


The Science of Friendship

by Pickwick12



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Family, Friendship, Gen, non-slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-02-23 09:12:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 67
Words: 26,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2542148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pickwick12/pseuds/Pickwick12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock's friends force him to write. What will the results be? Non-Slash. Includes the perspectives of other characters as well. It's lateral, abstract, angsty, and unusual, much like the world's only consulting detective. </p><p>This story is a four-year labor of love dedicated to the Sherlock fandom.</p><p>(Rated for intense themes/mentions of events in the show)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Science of Friendship

John Watson's Blog  
The Science of Friendship, a Guest Post by Sherlock Holmes

I don't write often. It hardly seems worthwhile to waste my valuable time sharing my methods with a public that cares little for careful observation. I am only doing so now because John has refused to do the shopping until I finish. He may be slow of observation, John, but he has certain powers of persuasion that cannot be denied.

Science, as I'm always reminding my chronicler, is at the heart of my methods, science and applied reasoning. Science gives me facts; reasoning chains those facts into a narrative. When all other narrative threads have failed, the one that remains must be true. It is that simple.

That's how I know.

The facts came first: Man, mid-thirties, veteran, medical, practical, dependable, and a host of other details that planted themselves unobtrusively in my consciousness. Then and there, I began picking through each of the possible narrative threads.

A handshake became a flatshare, and I ruled out immediate rejection.

A flatmate became a companion, and I ruled out loneliness.

A sounding-board became a colleague, and I ruled out uselessness.

A colleague became a necessity, and I ruled out a temporary arrangement.

A necessity became a gunshot, and I ruled out cowardice.

A gunshot became an offer to die, and I ruled out selfishness.

When every other thread had been ruled out, I was left with a single one: Friendship.

I believe I have now answered John's question and objections adequately. There is indeed a science to friendship. I see Mrs. Hudson has gone to the shops in the mean time.


	2. Chapter 2

John Watson's Blog

A Re-post from a Friend

After reading Sherlock's contribution to my blog, Molly, our friend from St. Bart's, asked him to do one for her. He'd never have said yes, except that the body of an MP with a very sketchy autopsy report is currently sitting in the St. Bart's morgue, and Sherlock would give his eyeteeth to see it. Turns out, she wanted "a blog post using song lyrics that describe you" instead. You can imagine the grumbling I heard while he was writing this.

Molly Hooper's Blog

Remember the name, Guest Post by Sherlock Holmes

This is 10% luck

I'll admit it freely. Sometimes I'm wrong, and I've been beaten before – not often, but it does happen. I didn't know Harry Watson was female. I was lucky that Eddie van Coon was left-handed. I should have considered the possibility that it was the cabbie, not his passenger. I've had my share of happy accidents that made all the difference. I should have died that day in SooLin's flat. John saved my life entirely by chance. His irritated rant about my faults, the one that confused Shan's gang, was the only thing that stood between me and six feet under. I think he considers it a lucky break, but I'm not entirely sure.

20% skill

As unbelievable as it may seem to the general public, I wasn't born a crime-solving infant, and I can say with decent certainty that I did not analyze my first set of fingerprints until the age of ten. My skills have been honed by years of practice, reading, and storing knowledge in my mental hard drive. Anyone can see, but few care to observe. Often, those closest to me are criminals. My decision to pursue the opposite path is completely unchangeable.

15% concentrated power of will

Concentration is a drug. It's why I'm alive, why I'm so thin that Mycroft calls me a scarecrow. Concentration is why I gave up the sweet romance that dulled my boredom, the love I had for the calming liquid that kills the brain. I divorced the closest thing I've ever had to a wife, the pleasure that comes from a hypodermic needle, because I valued my senses more. I'm addicted to focus, a problem-solving junkie. That's why I can't stand to be idle, why empty hours pull the strings of my disposition taut. I live for the fusion of concentration and will, the forces that make my mind a sharp tool instead of a blunt instrument. That fusion is what makes me not merely effective, but brilliant.

5% pleasure

They say there's a runner's high, a rush of endorphins after excessive exertion. I know that feeling. It's the same burst of euphoria that comes when mental exertion finally culminates in illumination. It's short-lived, almost momentary, but it's such intense pleasure that the cost is more than worth it.

50% pain

John thinks it doesn't bother me. He saw, but he didn't observe – the grief that entered my eyes when the blind old lady's voice was obliterated, the tenseness in my body when I heard the voice of a young child taunting me with the words of a maniac, the shame I felt when Soo Lin Yao's corpse was found, the shiver that went through me when John's life was in danger. I am human, and I have a heart to burn.

And 100% reason to remember the name

"Sherlock Holmes."

"Am I supposed to be impressed?"

"You should be."

The name's Sherlock Holmes. Don't forget it, not that I'll let you.


	3. Chapter 3

MEMO: This or a Knighthood

FROM: The Office of Mycroft Holmes

TO: The Office of the Director of Scotland Yard

I told my irascible little brother that unless he wrote something out about his perceptions of that intriguing little Irishman Moriarty, I would have him knighted immediately, or at least presented with an OBE. The horror of meeting Prince Charles had the intended effect. He would have tried to pawn the task off on poor Dr. Watson, but he knows me well enough to know that I'd have detected the difference in style immediately. Sherlock is rather clever, you know. I suggest placing this in the permanent files, as it may prove useful.

Jim Moriarty, by Sherlock Holmes

I saw Moriarty for the first time at St. Bart's. He looked so utterly innocuous that he immediately roused my suspicions. He wasn't what he seemed. The homosexuality was too easy, too predictable. I could easily imagine a man playing Molly for some angle, but I couldn't understand his particular attention to me. A man that bland shouldn't turn around and be that focused, that pointed, unless he has some bigger aim than deceiving others about his sexual orientation. I took note of him, but even an intellect as capable as mine cannot make inferences where there are no facts; I had no reason to connect Jim with his true identity.

When I saw him enter the pool enclosure, my thoughts were confirmed rather than surprised. Of course Moriarty would take on a boring, inoffensive persona. And yet, the duplicity had been there all along. Even as "Jim," he couldn't resist holding out deceptive bait. The lies run too deep for him to deal in truth, even where fake identities are concerned.

His own personality is a front. The taut voice, the tinny cheerfulness, the brittle anger. Nothing is genuine. Perhaps there's nothing genuine left. He's a crazy, brilliant, criminal shell, an off-kilter outlaw machine.

I have also been likened to a machine. Perhaps that is why I understand Moriarty so well. I know the boredom, the craving for drama, the need to be amazed and challenged. I am close friends with the world's cold shoulder; I know there's no place for a genius to rest. I, too, have felt the dangerous impression of invincibility, of a level of superiority that cannot be matched.

The question, then, is: Am I the same as Moriarty? If so, perhaps you're thinking now that my similarities will make me the ideal link in your chain, the one who can lead you to him.

Of course, your inadequate brains take forever to realize the pitfalls. If we are exactly the same, I have nothing, no edge to stab him with, no weighty secret to crush him with. If we're the same, I have an even chance, no more.

The truth is, I will definitely win, but only because we are not the same.

Moriarty knows we are different. He mentioned my heart, but it's far more than love that sets us apart. It is identity, at the most basic level. I have a heart because I have a self. Your psychiatrists would doubtlessly enjoy dissecting that in their unctuously clinical ways, but I mean exactly what I say, and I mean it simply. I know myself.

I detect, but I am not detection. I am intelligent, but I am not a disembodied brain. In all my years of work, I have never lost sight of the fact that I am nothing more or less than a man, and I am unafraid to be genuine. I have an honest self.

That is our biggest difference, and it is the rope I will use to tie Moriarty and finally hang him. You see, he has no real identity. For so long, he has been the larger-than-life spider in the middle of the giant web of crime, the shell in a Westwood suit, that he has completely lost himself as anything but an entity.

Moriarty has no heart because he has no self.

He believes my heart makes me weak. It is true. What he fails to realize, because he cannot, is that his lack of heart makes him weaker still.

Moriarty is not beatable because he is only a man. He is beatable because he is more than a man, and in becoming a legend, he has ceased to be a man at all.


	4. Chapter 4

A Write-up for Mrs. Hudson

"Sherlock, dear, I was going to ask John about this –"

"Not now, Mrs. Hudson! I've almost ascertained the effects of –"

"Yes, very nice, dear, but I need your help. You know you haven't paid me for the holes in the wall or the ruined microwave or the –"

"Very well, Mrs. Hudson. What is it, then?"

"That good-looking inspector, the one with the lovely suits. What's his name?"

"Lestrade."

"Oh, yes, Lestrade. He's sent me a lodger for 221c, a nice quiet policeman."

"Yes? That's very good. I'll get back to my experiment."

"No, dear, that's just it. He wants a reference from my current lodgers."

"Can't this wait until John gets back?"

"I'm afraid not, dear. He wants to move in right away if everything is in order."

Landlord Reference

Name: Sherlock Holmes

Relationship to applicant: Became lodger after ensuring husband's conviction for capital murder.

Length of relationship: Six years

Impression of applicant: Mrs. Hudson is completely reliable except when taking herbal soothers, which cause her to sing popular show tunes in a shockingly off-key manner. She has a surprisingly strong stomach and does not show any noticeable agitation upon finding desiccated animal or human remains.

Special accommodations: Prefers not to have designs tattooed into the walls of her flats by firearms.

Housekeeping arrangements: No need to engage additional housekeeper. Mrs. Hudson wishes to be called 'landlady' but performs all housekeeping duties capably.

Additional notes: Mrs. Hudson knows various unorganized pieces of popular information, such as the names of television personalities. This information can occasionally prove useful during criminal investigations.


	5. Chapter 5

From: The Office of Mycroft Holmes

To: Sherlock Holmes

What on earth do you mean by refusing a knighthood directly offered by the Queen? The infernal cheek! I've seen the letter. Chris sent it right over, with an enquiry about what on earth he should tell Her Majesty. I told him to rip it to pieces immediately and to prevent any further meetings and correspondence at all costs.

 

To: The Private Secretary of Her Majesty the Queen, Rt. Hon. Christopher Geidt CVO OBE

Dear Sir,

Please assure Her Majesty of my deepest thanks for the cashmere scarf she gifted to me at our recent meeting. I do not consider my recovery of the crown jewels to be worth such an honor; after all, it took me a mere week to deduce that the jewels were still in London. Please rest assured that I will maintain the utmost secrecy, as will my friend and associate, Dr. John Watson.

Please also inform Her Majesty that I remain determined to refuse the offer that she so kindly attempted to bestow on me. I do realize that suddenly standing and leaving the room when one is being knighted is hardly traditional protocol, but I felt that it was the simplest way to express my feelings at the time.

My services are always available if Her Majesty should require them, and I remain her faithful, thought titleless, subject,

Sherlock Holmes

 

From: Sherlock Holmes

To: The Office of Mycroft Holmes

"I told him to rip it to pieces immediately and prevent any further meetings and correspondence at all costs."

I win.

Sherlock


	6. Chapter 6

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: DI G. Lestrade

Sorry about the bank case. I hear you were stuck with Dimmock. I'll buy you a pint some time.

To: DI G. Lestrade

From: Sherlock Holmes

Do you intend to compound the annoyance of Dimmock by forcing me to endure an alcoholic beverage in your company?

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: DI G. Lestrade

Shall I send Anderson instead?

To: DI Lestrade

From: Sherlock Holmes

Send Donovan and Anderson. Then kill yourself.

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: DI G. Lestrade

You seem to be growing a sense of humor. This is a matter of national security. I'll alert Scotland Yard.

To: DI Lestrade

From: Sherlock Holmes

You are inconceivably annoying. 

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: DI G. Lestrade

I do try.


	7. Chapter 7

Dear Dr. Watson,

I'm sorry about writing you a letter like this, but I'm really afraid the police are monitoring my emails. It's been this way ever since Jim escaped. First a police inspector turned up at my flat and grilled me for three hours, and ever since, they've been coming almost every day and looking through my things.

They told me I could get a plea bargain if I confess to knowing something about what Jim did, but I don't know anything. Really, honestly, I didn't even know Jim existed until he asked me out for coffee a couple of weeks ago. I thought he was just the IT guy. I'm scared to death that if Bart's finds out that the police are investigating me, I'm going to get sacked. They haven't found anything in my flat, but I'm afraid they're going to arrest me anyway.

I don't really know why I'm writing to you, but you're the only person I could think of that might help. I don't have any family, and, well, Jim is the problem, and I don't know where he is, anyway. And Sherlock is – you know. I just don't have that many friends. Oh well, I'm probably silly to think it would matter to you, but I thought maybe you could at least put in a good word for me at Bart's when they find out.

Yours truly,

Molly Hooper

 

To: The Office of the Director of Scotland Yard

From: Sherlock Holmes

Dear Sir,

It has come to my attention that your inability to catch James Moriarty (despite all the clues I've provided) has led you so far afield that you are actually trying to pin something on Moriarty's girlfriend, the director of the morgue at St. Bartholomew's Hospital.

Believe me; I am well acquainted with the police's desire to have a suspect, even when no reasonable evidence points in any direction. I know how the wheels of official justice work, running over the guilty, but also the not-guilty if it suits the police's needs and makes the Yard look competent in the eyes of the public.

It hardly needs saying that you have no evidence against Miss Hooper and that you know now that you will find nothing beyond what you already have – a barely existent relationship between an ordinary woman and one of the most brilliant criminals of our time. You know as well as I do what she was, or, rather, wasn't, to him.

You, Sir, also know what I know. I strongly suspect that a certain six-year-old investigation has not slipped your mind. You doubtlessly remember that I singlehandedly saved a certain Detective Inspector whose star was rising from blundering in a way that would have ended not only his career but the careers of his associates. Odd how these things repeat themselves. I'm sure you can't have forgotten the circumstances of that case, the fact that the DI in charge was so overzealous to arrest someone that he would have destroyed the reputation of the Yard if I had not insisted on caution, and you will recall the feelings that filled you when the real perpetrator confessed.

Yes, you, the rising star with the unstained career. I dislike the underhandedness of subterfuge and blackmail, so let me be clear. For six years, I have kept my silence as I promised. I reasoned that you had learned your lesson, and I felt no obligation to tell what I knew. If you remain insistent upon repeating your mistake, I will consider circumstances to have changed.

I will not allow my silence to be a tool for the Yard to use for its own purposes. Stand this investigation down, Director, or I will tell what I know, and the proof will be incontrovertible.

Sincerely,

Sherlock Holmes

 

Dear Dr. Watson,

The police have stopped turning up, so I guess I don't need help after all. They say I'm not a suspect any more. I guess I'll take precautions for a few more days, but it looks like it's finally over. Thanks anyway for being nice.

Yours truly,

Molly Hooper


	8. Chapter 8

A/N: On November 5, the English celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. Guy Fawkes formulated a plan called the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the King and the British government in 1605. His plot was discovered, and the government was saved. Traditionally, the English have bonfires on this holiday and burn effigies of Guy Fawkes. (If you have seen V for Vendetta, Guy Fawkes is a huge part of the plot.)

 

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,  
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,  
I know of no reason  
Why the Gunpowder Treason  
Should ever be forgot.  
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent  
To blow up the King and Parli'ment.  
Three-score barrels of powder below  
To prove old England's overthrow;  
By God's providence [or By God's mercy] he was catch'd  
With a dark lantern and burning match.  
Hulloa boys, Hulloa boys, let the bells ring.  
Hulloa boys, hulloa boys, God save the Queen!

-Traditional Poem

 

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: G. Lestrade

Sherlock,

Donovan happened to be driving by your flat last night, and she claims the bonfire on the edge of Baker Street was burning something that looked less like an effigy of Guy Fawkes and more like a corpse. Please tell me she was wrong.

Lestrade

 

To: G. Lestrade

From: Sherlock Holmes

Lestrade,

Guy Fawkes Night seemed by far the most appropriate time to conduct certain experiments I've been anticipating that relate to the effects of several combustible substances on human flesh. I used the corpse of a Mr. Charles Dunaway. He didn't seem to mind, since he was deceased. I rather think he would have considered it an honor to serve science in this way, and on such a festive night. Don't worry; he had no family, and I only borrowed him after St. Bart's was finished. I now have material for at least three new scientific papers.

The other residents of Baker Street thanked John and me for our service to the community by promoting the festive spirit, and none of them ascertained that Mr. Dunaway was anything other than a Guy Fawkes from the junk shop down the street. Alcohol, I believe, was of assistance to us in this respect.

If you wish to congratulate me for conducting such malodorous and large-scale experiments in such a discreet manner, I will not object to the compliment.

S.H.

p.s. I saw Sergeant Donovan. She was not alone.


	9. Chapter 9

To: Mycroft Holmes

From: Sherlock Holmes

Mycroft,

There is no way you could possibly expect such an email, which is why I am writing it. All the more gratifying for me to imagine your surprise upon its receipt.

When I first met John Watson, he told me something obvious. He said that regular people don't have archenemies, that they go about their regular, non-dramatic lives liking some and disliking others. I called this boring, as you may imagine.

Our lives, Mycroft, have never been boring, have they? You were my archenemy when we played Risk as boys and Chess as teenagers. You were my archenemy when you chose Oxford knowing I had always wanted to attend Cambridge. You were also my archenemy when you started climbing the ranks of droning government work, knowing full well I would never submit to such a conventional destiny. Hardly unexpected that you are my archenemy now that you have ascended to the upper rungs of your ladder, and I remain fixed on my own path.

Do you remember when we read The Napoleon of Notting Hill as children? Two heroes, one for you, and the other for me. You were Adam Wayne, the true believer, convinced that his nation was right, willing to shed blood in the streets for his ideals. I was Auberon Quin, the skeptic who laughed at everything and believed in nothing. How could we not be archenemies, you and I?

I remember the day I reached the end of the story. I couldn't understand it. How could two characters who had pitted armies against each other stroll off into the night arm-in-arm? My adolescent mind could not grasp the author's purpose. I understand it now.

The day our parents died, you were the constant. Adults came and went, outsiders to our grief, but you and I were one and the same. The bitter argument over where I was to spend my final years of preparatory school showed me that my future mattered to someone. Your disagreement reminded my stubborn mind that one other person in this world cared what happened. The one person who came to my graduation from Cambridge was you – the archenemy I couldn't do without.

I know now why G.K. Chesterton's archenemies finished their story walking in step with one another, finally cognizant of the fact that each was essential to the other. You and I will never be on the same side, but we are neither one complete without the other.

Many happy returns.

S.H.


	10. Chapter 10

Dear Mr. Holmes,

Hi, I'm Drew. The other day, I was walking home from school, and some men took me away and made me wear a jacket that had bombs. I called you on the phone, and I don't really know what happened, but you made them go away. My mum said I should write to you and say thanks. Inspector Lestrade gave us your address. Anyway, thanks.

Love,

Drew

p.s. I wish we lived in the city like you.

p.p.s. I wish I was as smart as you.

 

Drew,

The police never think children know anything, so I'm sure they didn't tell you what happened. A very bad man named Moriarty made those men kidnap you. I saved your life by showing that a very expensive painting was fake because it had a new star in the sky that didn't appear when the real painter was alive. His name was Vermeer.

S.H.

p.s. The city is like a giant spider web full of lots of stupid people and a few clever people.

p.p.s. Hardly anyone is as smart as me, but you're clever.

 

Dear Mr. Holmes,

I looked up Vermeer on the Internet. I also found your website. I would rather be a detective than paint things.

Love,

Drew

p.s. Where is the spider?

p.p.s. Mummy wants to know why you think I'm clever. She says if I was, I wouldn't be so rubbish at homework.

 

Drew,

Me too. Detectives can also paint things, though, like you do. I play the violin.

S.H.

p.s. There is a good spider and a bad spider. One is Moriarty, and the other one is my brother. Don't worry about it.

p.p.s. I could tell you were clever when I talked to you on the phone because you counted down slowly, but not too slowly.

 

Dear Mr. Holmes,

How did you know I paint things?

Love,

Drew

p.s. I wish my brother was a spider.

p.p.s. Mummy doesn't understand.

 

Drew,

Your first letter had a paint stain on it.

S.H.

p.s. No, you don't.

p.p.s. A stupid person would have counted fast and risked getting killed because I couldn't solve the mystery, or counted too slowly and risked getting killed for irritating the bomber.

 

Dear Mr. Holmes,

Mummy wants to know if you are married and if not, can she have your number?

Love,

Drew

p.s. My brother is not a spider. He is a baby.

p.p.s. Mummy says she is sure I am clever and will make sure I get into special classes for gifted children.

 

Drew,

Write again when your mother stops reading your post.

S.H.

p.s. If your brother takes an interest in politics at an early age, you have cause for concern.

p.p.s. Tell your mother to take you out of school and feed you sweets all day. That would be equally useful.


	11. Chapter 11

A/N: I am aware that Britain does not have capital punishment. The reference to it in this chapter is meant to indicate that Sherlock has consulted on cases for other nations that do, just as he did with Mrs. Hudson's husband.

 

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: The Office of the Cambridge Alumni Association

Dear Mr. Holmes,

It's that exciting time again! We here at alumni HQ are beyond chuffed to announce this year's 'Where are they Now?' insert in our upcoming alumni newsletter. Enclosed please find a slip of paper and a pre-addressed envelope for you to use to let your fellow Cambridge alumni know what you've been up to lately.

Sincerely,

Dorothea Stockbridge

Director of Alumni Relations, Cambridge University

p.s. We've also enclosed a donation form for the Cambridge Athletics Department. We know you won't want to miss out on the opportunity to give others the chance to experience Cambridge sports the way you did.

 

To: The Office of the Cambridge Alumni Association

From: Sherlock Holmes

Dear Madam,

I recall from previous years that if I do not respond to your abominable letter, I will receive repeated contact in the form of emails, letters, and finally, telephone calls. I am responding only to forestall such irksome annoyances, not from any desire to further the mission of Cambridge or entertain my fellow alumni. Please feel free to print my enclosed description of my activities. I would, now that I think about it, quite enjoy seeing it in print.

S.H.

p.s. If you would stop sending such a ridiculous amount of post, the Cambridge Athletics Department would have no need for additional funding.

 

Name: Sherlock Holmes

Graduation Year:1995

Current Activities: In the years since skipping graduation, I have published monographs on the subjects of types of tobacco ash, the decay rate of human remains in various conditions, the amount of force required to decapitate a grown man, and the importance of understanding insect life in crime detection. That completes my hobbies.

Vocationally, I have sent fifty-two people to prison. Five were embezzlers, ten were burglars, eight were rapists, nine were drug dealers, five were counterfeiters, ten were one-time murderers, and five were serial killers. Two have since been executed by the justice systems of their nations, and one remains on death row. I have also solved thirty-two mysteries without a criminal element for those too incompetent to solve their own conundrums. In addition, I remain current in my mastery of Jujitsu, Karate, and Krav Maga.

Future Plans: Once I despair completely of the lack of creativity among the modern criminal class, I intend to retire and keep bees, who are far more reasonable than humans.

 

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: The Office of the Cambridge Alumni Association

Dear Mr. Holmes,

Thank you so much for your prompt reply to our request for information! Unfortunately, the newsletter is already full, so we will be unable to include your valued contribution. Thanks anyway!

Sincerely,

Dorothea Stockbridge

Director of Alumni Relations, Cambridge University

p.s. We've included a donation form to give you the opportunity to show how much Cambridge means to you.


	12. Chapter 12

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: John Watson

Sherlock,

I found your Christmas list. I had no idea you celebrated. Thank you for providing such a handy outline of your wishes. Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft will no doubt be pleased as well.

Watson

 

3 aubergine shirts, long-sleeved, button-down

1 set onyx block cufflinks

1 electronic Encyclopedia Britannica, updated

1 Apple iPhone 4

1 Bunsen burner

5 test tubes

1 scarf, check styles when not busy

 

To: John Watson

From: Sherlock Holmes

John,

You need hardly react so strongly to my scribbling. That list is anything but a "Christmas wish," or whatever maudlin name you'd like to call it. It is simply a shopping list of things I need and intend to purchase in the next few weeks.

S.H.

 

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: John Watson

Sherlock,

Very handy of you to list it all out like that. I'd strongly recommend against buying anything, or you'll have duplicates come December 25th. Lestrade is picking the scarf. I'm sure you'll be pleased.

Watson

 

To: John Watson

From: Sherlock Holmes

John,

Might you add a skull to the list?

S.H.

p.s. I am unsure how I am expected to respond, as I have received no gifts for the past ten years except Mrs. Hudson's annual knitted hats.

 

To: Sherlock Holmes

From: John Watson

Sherlock,

Certainly not. Skulls do not mix with Christmas.

Watson

p.s. Saying thank you is usually well-received.


	13. Chapter 13

A/N: This chapter is a follow-up to "This or a Knighthood" and was directly inspired by a question Afriel asked me in a review of that chapter.

 

To: The Office of the Director of Scotland Yard

From: Sherlock Holmes

Dear Sir,

I am writing this in return for the favor Inspector Lestrade recently did me and my friend John Watson, namely, that of giving us full and free permission to possess and carry whatever handguns we deem necessary for the completion of our work. My side of the bargain was to answer a question that has been posed by several members of the Yard regarding my previous explanation of that most fascinating criminal mind, Jim Moriarty.

Here is the question, as it has been put to me: "I offer my apologies in advance for over-analyzing; but does this mean that Moriarty is beatable because he has lost his identity as a man? - he becomes a machine, a brain without a heart, and while I fear I'm showing my ignorance here, wouldn't that make him a even more powerful opponent?"

Now, I will seek to answer it satisfactorily.

 

I am no philosopher or psychologist, so I will reason plainly. Humanity may be seen as a strength, as a weakness, as a joy, or as a pain. I do not know or care which description is most accurate. What concerns me is the truth, the plain facts, and they are these:

I am human being, and James Moriarty is a human being. In most ways, we are similar.

What separates us is our attitude toward the facts. My humanity is always in front of me. I know that I cannot go beyond the scope of my abilities and the range of my mind. I am honest, exactingly so. I know what I can do, and I know what I cannot do.

Moriarty long ago lost his identity as a person who loves or feels or lives as a regular human, but that is not the main reason for his fallibility. The greatest reason for his weakness is his dishonesty.

I have often wished that I could be completely unclouded by human emotion, but I have never fallen into the trap of denying my humanity and the boundaries it imposes. I know the consequences of my actions, and I protect myself, even from myself if I must. My friend, John Watson, is just such a protection—a buffer against the limits of my mind and conscience. I know my weaknesses.

As Moriarty has stepped further and further into his web of crime and deceit, he has certainly left behind normal human relationships and experiences, but even more vitally, he has left behind all honesty about himself. He actually dared to believe that he could change plain facts and become more than his humanity will ever allow, and he truly lost his identity is a man—his ability to perceive his own fragility. It has been too long since someone showed his humanity to him, and that is exactly what I will do.

I have no wish to speculate on the nature of the human soul, but I am certain without doubt that a man who denies his limits as a human can be beaten, and he will be.

S.H.


	14. Chapter 14

New Year's Resolutions

By John Watson, M.D.

1\. Blog more often when caseload permits.

2\. Stay awake at work.

3\. Patch things up with Harry (again).

4\. Find new ways to keep Sherlock from getting bored and shooting things.

 

New Year's Resolutions

By Mrs. Hudson, Landlady (not housekeeper)

1\. Stop doing Sherlock's and John's laundry whenever asked.

2\. Find a new favorite show. (That poor Connie Prince. I still can't believe she was murdered like that—by that handsome houseboy!)

3\. Stop fixing Sherlock's and John's meals whenever asked.

4\. Get new wallpaper for the living room and add it to Sherlock's rent.

5\. Stop picking up after Sherlock and John every day.

 

New Year's Resolutions

By G. Lestrade, Detective Inspector

1\. Solve at least one case without help.

2\. Get Sherlock and Donovan to both crack a smile at the same crime scene.

3\. Yell less after coming home from working with Sherlock.

4\. Find out where Dr. Watson buys his jumpers. (lovely fabric)

 

New Year's Resolutions

By Molly Hooper, MorgueChick99 (Oh dear, does that sound too cutesy? Must decide whether or not it will work as my new Chatroulette screenname)

1\. Stop blushing whenever Sherlock Holmes comes into the room.

2\. Crochet Dr. Watson a mug cozy.

3\. Visit Jim in prison wearing something adorable to make him sad about what he's lost. (I don't suppose I have anything cute enough for this. I should ask Sarah to go shopping with me. She's so terribly self-assured.)

4\. Adopt another cat so my little one doesn't look so lonely whenever I leave the house.

 

New Year's Resolutions

By Sarah Sawyer, M.D., CDO

1\. Contact Harry Watson? (Might do to at least get acquainted.)

2\. Continue cordial relationship with Sherlock Holmes, no matter how obtuse he is.

3\. Schedule John whenever the patient load is low, to provide opportunities for time together.

4\. Marry John Watson.

5\. Dye hair red. (maybe, and who cares if he likes it or not?)

 

New Year's Resolutions

By Mycroft Holmes, Person of "Minor" Government Position

1\. Blackmail French ambassador for state secrets.

2\. Make Anthea spend a day without her Blackberry. (for personal amusement)

3\. Destroy Sherlock's ability to text and make him talk instead. (I do like to imagine my dreams coming true, at times, I'm afraid. Terribly fanciful of me.)

 

New Year's Resolutions

By Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective

1\. Idiotic New Year's tradition. Traditions are for drones.

2\. Hide Mrs. Hudson's herbal soothers until she agrees to let me have a skull.

3\. Train John to bring me food without having to ask.

4\. Pickpocket Lestrade's keys in addition to his I.D. badge.

5\. Visit Moriarty in prison to enjoy his company.

6\. Successfully refuse to help Mycroft.

7\. Sneak up on Donovan and Anderson on a date and play violin loudly. (too infantile for my level, perhaps, but nonetheless enjoyable)


	15. Chapter 15

Tea and Observation

By S.H., Consulting Detective

[Draft: to be published on website when complete.]

The average person doesn't notice tea; it's just there, like cabbies and lifts and doorknobs, but it has a story to tell, as vital as the story spun by fingerprints or bloodstains at a crime scene.

The tea my flatmate John Watson drinks, for instance, tells a great deal about him—that he's traditional, enjoys repetition, has an adventurous streak about him, and is a veteran who is proud of his service. How do I know? First, the facts: John drinks P.G. Tips every week day and changes to Tazo Chai on the weekends. Next, the deductive threads: P.G. Tips is an old, quality brand, neither fancy nor self-consciously cheap. The man who drinks it daily is not interested in varying his experience and is not complicated in his tastes. And yet, this same man brews intensely strong American chai on the weekends, to be drunk while he absorbs mind-numbing television. That is the paradox of John Watson, a man who loves simple things but can't quite live without spice. Additionally, John drinks both tea and coffee from a Royal Army Medical Corps mug, which is a constant reminder of his prior service, one he could easily forego if he did not wish to encounter it. All of these things, observable through his tea-drinking habits alone, paint an accurate and even nuanced portrait of my friend. Patient observation can reveal many personal qualities based on a person's taste in tea.

Mrs. Hudson's habits are equally revelatory. Normally, she uses a flowered china teapot, which she washes with the evening's dishes. Tea made in this pot is consistently of medium strength. On occasion, she changes to a cast iron pot instead, and the tea that issues forth from it is inconsistent, sometimes very strong and other times so weak it is barely drinkable. One may deduce from this that she is usually absent mentally while making tea in the second pot. The reason for this aberration is that the pot was a gift from her deceased murderer husband. She feels guilty never using it, but it has so many bad memories attached to it that she is unable to use it properly. In this sort of way, a person's teamaking can reveal things about his or her mental state.

My brother Mycroft's assistant, Anthea, is a woman I have seen very few times, but I know something about her because of what I see in her hand. Along with her Blackberry, I almost never encounter her without a cup of tea from Starbucks. Clearly, she does not care about expense, as she could prepare tea at home for a miniscule fraction of what she pays. The Starbucks brand name indicates that she is more interested in convenience and being mainstream than in seeking out the unusual or the highest quality for the price. The place a person chooses to buy his or her tea can indicate financial status and is a predictor of a person's attitude toward being inside or outside current fashion.

Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard eschews tea altogether and drinks several cups of coffee each day, from which I deduce that he is most likely sleep deprived and addicted to caffeine. If he simply disliked the taste of tea, he could replace it with a moderate amount of coffee. As it is, he is rarely without a flask, indicating that he needs caffeine to function properly. Even the absence of tea in someone's daily routine can sometimes suggest questions for inquiry.

Of course, most of my readers will likely have times in which they need to make observations quickly, without the benefit of lengthy observation. Some inferences can be made almost immediately. Incessant tea drinking can indicate an addictive personality. A tea order that is overly specific, such as one that requires an exact amount of water or milk, can indicated a finicky temperament. Watching a person closely as they lift their cup, to see if their hands shake, can reveal nervousness. Being served a stale cup of tea can indicate either dislike on the part of a host or a tightened budget that requires reuse of old leaves.

These are but a few of the many ways in which a simple, albeit pervasive, national habit can provide rich fodder to the observant mind.

Finally, an example from my own career: A man who appeared guilty once claimed an alibi by saying that he was home with his wife drinking tea during the time a murder was committed. I knew from observing their habits that this could not be the case because their dustbin only contained four teabags, the amount that I had observed his wife making in their teapot when she knew she would be drinking alone. The wife, who had previously been unwilling to corroborate or deny his story, admitted to me that I was right, and I was then able to work from a presumption of probable guilt and prove the man's culpability. Tea provided the catalyst that led me to the solution of the murder and to the man's death at the hands of the law. As I mentioned above, Mrs. Hudson, the wife in question, still uses the teapot she shared with her husband occasionally, as she seems unable to cease feeling somewhat guilty for the part she played in his death.


	16. Chapter 16

A/N Sherlock Holmes's official birthday is January 6th. Mine is today (January 23rd), and this chapter is a little gift to you all.

 

From: John Watson

To: Sherlock Holmes

Why didn't you tell me it was your birthday two weeks ago?

John

From: Sherlock Holmes

To: John Watson

Age is a societal construct and biological phenomenon with no importance to the life of the mind. 

S.H.

From: John Watson

To: Sherlock Holmes

I guess I'll send back the skull I ordered, then.

John

From: Sherlock Holmes

To: John Watson

No need. I found it in the box in your closet last week and have it displayed in my bedroom at present.

S.H.

 

 

From: G. Lestrade

To: Sherlock Holmes

Heard it was your birthday. You should have told me. The boys at the Yard would have gotten you a cake.

Lestrade

From: Sherlock Holmes

To: G. Lestrade

You'd have to have Sally taste it first, to keep Anderson from lacing it with cyanide.

S.H.

 

 

From: Mrs. Hudson

To: Sherlock Holmes

I knew it was your birthday, dear. That's why I didn't complain about the horrible chemical smell in the flat for a whole week. 

Mrs. H.

 

 

From: Mycroft Holmes

To: Sherlock Holmes

Happiness is such a fleeting philosophical construct, don't you think? And birthdays are so very tedious.

Mycroft

From: Sherlock Holmes

To: Mycroft Holmes

I'm attempting to deduce whether you texted out of some kind of birthday obligation to be courteous to me or because you're unable to talk at the moment.

S.H.

From: Mycroft Holmes

To: Sherlock Holmes

Wasn't I kind to present you that little puzzle for your birthday?

Mycroft


	17. Chapter 17

Delete when Finished

"Would caring about them help save them?" I asked John. "Then I'll continue not to make that mistake." His face was a mask of disappointment and incredulity and anger. I hated that look. He couldn't see the truth, and I couldn't explain it to him. "I've been reliably informed that I don't have one," I said to Moriarty, hoping he'd leave it there. He didn't, of course. My enemy knew me better than my friend.

John didn't know that I've made the mistake before. He didn't see the tears in my eyes, real tears, the day I saw the woman and her son lying dead at the Waverley morgue. I was sixteen, and I felt like their murderer.

It started with the death of an unassuming farmer, a murder I knew I could solve. I had solved little problems before, but nothing like this. He was found in a field with a bullet through his temple and no evidence in sight. I knew far less than I know now, but I investigated. He was a neighbor, and no one seemed to care that the quiet Holmes boy was wandering around.

What no one knew was that I couldn't eat, and I couldn't sleep. The sight of the murdered man and the screaming wife and the sobbing child wouldn't leave my mind. When I walked through the fields with my father's old-fashioned magnifier, I didn't want to be there. I wanted to run back to my books and my quiet house.

That's what made me slow, so slow that I didn't solve it until it was too late. My feelings, my heart, made me cloudy-eyed, preoccupied with the horror, until my reasoning was compromised by the other things filling my head. The moment I knew who the murderer was came right before the news that the rest of the family had joined their father.

No one could understand why I insisted on seeing the bodies, why I cried for them like I hadn't for family members I had lost. I gave the police enough evidence to convict the murderer, and I was suddenly a local hero, but it didn't matter. The guilt of what my feelings had caused me to miss made me thinner than normal, paler than normal, made Mycroft more anxious for my health than ever. It's why I ended up in Cambridge the following autumn.

Tedious, too tedious to write out the journey from there to here, the way I came to realize that having no heart at all was what made it possible for me to be quicker than any criminal, that blanking out every feeling was the very thing that would enable me to save the weeping, agonized faces. If I must lose sleep, it would be over chains of reasoning, not horrifying images. If I must cry, it would be in the service of the case, to gain the information I needed. If my appetite departed, I would use the time to tighten the net around the criminals I sought.

Moriarty understood this because he is the same. Somewhere behind his twisted brain, he had moments like mine, moments when he realized that feelings delay and hearts kill.

That's why I was so afraid the moment James Moriarty stared me down. It wasn't impending death or pain that made me want to run. It was the realization, borne down by those cold eyes, that my heart is not dead like his. It is under lock and key, but it is alive.

John—kind, faithful, warm, like the jumpers he so often wears, will never understand. In his world, feelings are what humanize us, the catalysts that give us the will to help others. He does not know that to me, the heart is lethal.


	18. Chapter 18

the way the spider thinks

Taunting, sneering, pointing. You talk funny! You talk funny! Too small. Too smart. Too weird. Weird is good. I like weird. Weird is a compliment, not a slam. Weird is who you become, more and more, until normal is the insult and weird is the praise.

He had big feet. Those stupid big feet that made him faster than everyone else. He was the one they said would put our school on the map. Nobody cared that I was the best chemistry student in the county. All they cared about was the blue ribbons he won. But I changed all that. Chemistry killed him. Chemistry made him die, and then they all cared. They cried their tears, and for the first time, I knew what it was like to win. They say winning isn't everything. I knew then that they lie. The winners lie to keep the losers from trying again.

I kept winning. In university, people actually care that you're clever, but that didn't matter any more, not to me. The more they courted me, the less I wanted them. Winning meant twisting people, not living up to them. It meant shoving in the knife without being there to watch the blood flow, scaring without showing, taking whatever I wanted without touching anything. Winning in the shadows, untouchable.

Winning gets boring. Not boring in itself, but deadly boring when you realize that no one else is left to challenge you. It's not really winning when there's no fight. That's why the words Sherlock Holmes meant so much, why a name came to mean everything.

At first, he was nothing, an irritant like the others. Gnats. Neither useful nor interesting. But when I batted them away, this one didn't fly. He got bigger and bigger, until he weighed down my net, until he actually started to concern me. Early birthday present for Jim, all wrapped up in holier-than-thou wrapping paper.

And then I was faced with a choice, the biggest one of my life, maybe, bigger even than the one I faced when I held the beaker over Carl Powers's skin cream and knew that if I poured, there would be no going back. I stared into eyes, steady and icy, but hiding fire behind them, and I thought I would let him live. Sherlock Holmes and Jim Moriarty—archnemeses. Winning would never be boring again.

But then it hit me—the horrible dilemma I now faced. I could kill the one person with the power to make me feel, or I could let him live and be killed. I saw with perfect clarity that it would be one or the other. Beat or be beaten. Win now or lose later. "Neither can live while the other survives." I do love J.K. Rowling's prose.

I turned and walked back to the pool. After all, winning is everything.


	19. Chapter 19

Sleuth Magazine 

The Essence of a Pocket Magnifier

Guest Editorial by Sherlock Homes

In my work as the world's only consulting detective, I often come into contact with many professional law enforcement officers. Confronted by a crime scene, these individuals begin to assemble all sorts of complicated and time-consuming technological equipment, until a single crime scene begins to resemble a top-secret military facility with enough power to knock airplanes out of the sky.

No doubt, many readers of Sleuth Magazine will have seen this sort of thing happening in English and American crime dramas, those emotionally-laden soap operas of fake detection. Perhaps would-be deductive reasoners have even been daunted by the prospect of apparatuses of detection they can ill-afford.

I must inform such easily-misled individuals of the dozens, approaching hundreds, of times I have walked confidently into a crime scene, armed only with a small mobile phone and pocket magnifier, and solved a case before the police were finished assembling their equipment. In such cases, even the phone is optional. It saves time, but a pocket magnifier is all that is needed.

A pocket magnifier can reveal the intricacies of a splatter pattern, the exact angle of an entry wound, or the discoloration on the edge of a piece of paper. While the police are taking digital photos, transferring those photos to high-powered computers, and then enlarging them for a better look—only to find them pixelated beyond recognition, the detective with a good pocket magnifier will have taken in the evidence in an instant and moved on.

On occasion, I am asked which technology has aided me most in my career as a consulting detective. As cases progress, I make use of computers, smartphone capabilities, GPS, high-powered microscopes, and many other cutting-edge technologies. At the outset, however, the best possible tool is a simple pocket magnifier. In fact, most of my cases could eventually be solved using no other aid.

Sound deductive reasoning is a would-be detective's most important ability. Beyond that, a pocket magnifier is an invaluable resource, one that will enable an observant mind to reach the conclusion of almost any problem. Forgo useless complications and rely on the one essential tool needed by every sleuth.


	20. Chapter 20

Unfortunately for me, though perhaps fortunate for the rest of the world, John is holding my overcoat hostage until I provide another entry for that ridiculous badwidth receptacle of verbal vomit known as his "blog." He says it's only fair since he's done the washing up every day for the past month. I say he might as well have waited. Mrs. Hudson would have done it in the end.

At any rate, if I've learned one thing about John Watson, it's that is that he's stubborn. No amount of dessicated human remains in jars left around the flat will sway him from his nefarious purposes. I say nefarious, but if that word in any way conveys a sense of mystery or subterfuge, then it is misunderstood. John Watson is not mysterious in the least.

You see, if I purposed to steal my own overcoat, or, better yet, Mycroft's overcoat, I would concoct an airtight plan involving noxious chemicals, forged post, a violent diversion, or, perhaps, all three if I was feeling particularly buoyant. Not so my flatmate. Instead, a mere two hours ago, John marched into my room, grabbed my Belstaff coat, and took it hostage into his bedroom, after which act of perfidy, he sat down coolly in the living room to read Modern Doctor and try to look as if he's not amused.

Such is the pitfall of living with someone like John Watson. Totally shameless.

I find that I've now outwitted John by writing over 200 words of nothing, which he may take or leave as he wishes as soon as my coat reappears in my closet.


	21. Chapter 21

From: DancingQueen83

To: Mycroft Holmes

Mr. Holmes,

What's the deal with my brother and your brother? I couldn't care less what's going on. I just want to know that John's ok. He won't talk to me, so I had to resort to other methods.

Harry Watson

From: The Office of Mycroft Holmes

To: Miss Harriett Watson

Miss Watson,

I assume you've read Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and if you haven't, there's little hope for you. Then again, I can only assume you were recently educated by the British school system, which makes the possibility far less probable. At any rate, Samuel Johnson was a rather unpleasant historical figure, a genius and groundbreaking scholar in the18th century, with whom no one wanted to work because of his difficult personality. To his great fortune, he became friends with another man, James Boswell, who was content to spend his life following Johnson around and writing about him.

Put simply, Miss Watson, Dr. Watson is my brother's Boswell. Sherlock is unpleasant (to the extreme), sarcastic, bossy, and short-tempered. For some reason, incomprehensible to me, your brother is resolutely unperturbed by these unfortunate qualities and actually seeks out Sherlock's company. In fairness to my brother, I must also point out that no one would remember the name James Boswell if not for Samuel Johnson. In the same way, it's unlikely that your brother would have been in any way remarkable (meaning no disrespect to his character) sans his association with my brother—an association that has led to the apprehension of wanted criminals and the return of valuable stolen property and which will almost certainly reach new heights in the future.

Miss Watson, for many years it has been my job to know people and to understand them. I must acknowledge, however, that I do not understand why your brother chooses to make mine the object of his remarkable loyalty and friendship. I only know that it is true and that the association has proved beneficial to them both.

Yours,

Mycroft Holmes

 

A/N: Special thanks to other writers (including Sir ACD himself) who suggested the idea of Holmes and Watson as Johnson and Boswell. For those who may not have read it, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is a fabulous read, and I highly recommend it.


	22. Chapter 22

To: Sarah Sawyer

Give me back my flatmate.

SH

 

To: Sherlock Holmes

No. I like him.

Sarah

 

To: Sarah Sawyer

You like him. I need him for brainwork. I win.

SH

 

To: Sherlock Holmes

Ask your skull instead.

Sarah

 

To: Sarah Sawyer

But it looks ridiculous wearing John's jumper.

SH

 

To: Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock, put my jumper back.

Watson

 

To: John Watson

Not until you come back to the flat.

SH

 

To: Sherlock Holmes

I'm coming, drat you.

Watson

 

To: Sarah Sawyer

I told you I win.

SH


	23. Chapter 23

341

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round—

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

This is the Hour of Lead—

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—

First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

-Emily Dickinson

 

Sherlock and I, we never speak of death. It's the unspoken thing between us that sits heavy on our thoughts those nights we prowl, and wander, and seek things we shouldn't want to see or feel.

We have felt death, we two, disparately, before we knew one another. I, shot on the field of battle, felt death like molted lead rip through my shoulder. I railed against it, pushed away the pain I thought signaled its coming, until even in recovery I was only a part of myself, afraid to face the grinning skull.

My friend, my brother, he felt it many times before we met, in alleys at gun-ends, in bars and drug-haunts. When he speaks of these times, his masklike face takes on a sneer, a dare, disdain. Too much disdain, too brazen. It's as if his very recklessness has caused death to turn aside, miffed at his disrespect.

And so, we two met, I terrified of death's grip, he too eager to grasp it. He took a murderer's challenge, and I stared once again into the face of mortality. I stared, and I aimed, and I fired. My powder-stained fingers wrenched away the icy grasp of death.

My friend, too, saw death that night, but for the first time, he looked through its hollow eyes into the eyes of a friend. He gazed past the yawning dark and saw substance in its place—the substance of a man half-empty but willing to give whatever was left. Something even more interesting than death.

An odd mutual friend, death—a strange companion to link one to someone else. But Sherlock Holmes is no average man, and I, with all my flaws, no average friend.


	24. Chapter 24

Re: Annoying Things about Being a Cop

Posted by: GLestrade69

8:56 p.m.

Why can't I ever find my I.D. badges? My wife says she doesn't do anything with them, but I say they can't just vanish into thin air. I mean, I've had about 20 of those things made already this year. Maybe it's the drycleaner where I send my shirts. I've heard of socks vanishing in the dryer, but I.D. badges? I've grilled the kids about it, like maybe it's a prank they have with their mates or something, but no. They say they don't have them, and they're not lying. I can tell. I've always been a human lie detector. I said human, mind you. Doesn't always extend to Sherlock Holmes, but he's something not quite human, or maybe slightly more than human. I'm not sure which. Anyway, I'm getting frustrated. It's not like it's that big of a deal, but being the head of Scotland Yard causes me enough stress without finding out once again that I can't show I.D. because another badge has mysteriously disappeared off the front of my lapel. I thought it was Sergeant Donovan at first, but one look at her face reassured me that there's no way "Sally" and "prank" really belong in the same sentence. Maybe I have a stalker.

 

A/N Thank you again and again to all who have read this story and all who have reviewed it. I hope you will keep enjoying it. I'm excited every time I see a comment or a notification that someone has added it to their alerts/favorites. You're great readers.


	25. Chapter 25

The Science of Reading

I don't read things the way other people read things.

Mrs. Hudson loves romance novels, of course. It's hardly surprising. Once, when she'd had half a glass too much sherry, she confided to John that she'd written one. I was listening from the next room. I might conveniently remember it the next time she starts to complain about the carpet stains.

Lestrade loves crime novels. Typically cliché. He only reads them for tips, of course. During his Poirot phase, suspicious-looking fuzz appeared above his upper lip. Thankfully, his wife, while completely nonsensical in most respects as evidenced by the fact that she married him, nipped the unfortunate thing in the bud.

My brother Mycroft reads classics in their languages of origin. He once spent an entire day researching derivatives of a single Greek word. He was thirteen at the time, but I have no doubt he does the same whenever he has the chance.

John is the most amusing reader I know. His collection is filled with loads of innocuously British fiction of the likes of James Herriot and Miss Read. To peruse his bookshelf is to see the tastes of a man who is nearly eighty, incurably prudish, and tut-tuttingly English. And yet, John Watson is none of these things. As evidence of a person's character, his taste in literature is a brilliant and completely unintentional red herring.

And so to me. Yesterday I read a year's worth of issues of the American edition of a women's magazine called Marie Claire. My voracious appetite for articles about footwear could hardly be surpassed by female teenagers in the vast metropolises of the American states. The day before, it was books on hairdressing from the shelves of the Library of London. Tomorrow I plan to tackle Vogue Knitting. The articles on technique are massively informative. If they are of even marginal intelligence, which I doubt, readers of John's blog will be aware that such reading material can hardly be selected for my pleasure or edification.

Just yesterday, John told me I looked like a bloodhound while I was digesting an article about the re-emergence of animal print pumps for autumn, and a bloodhound is what I am. Every article, every page, every sentence is sniffed for its particular scent and stored away if relevant, discarded if not. Women's shoes may easily surpass world politics in relevance; what matters, of course, is the Game.

People read as they eat, for enjoyment and pleasure and fellowship with the countless others eating or reading the same things. I also read as I eat—out of necessity. I read what I must to know what I must so that my brain can do its work. Words impart facts, and facts are the fuel that keeps my engine running.


	26. Chapter 26

The first time John ever saw my makeup collection was, I'll admit, hilarious. Even more apropos was the fact that it followed closely on our misunderstanding at the restaurant—the time I thought my friend was asking me for a date. I realize it's not every man who has a set of face paint to rival even the most dedicated of women. Of course, most women are only trying to become better versions of themselves, whereas I set out to become other people entirely.

Disguise is an art, one I am capable of producing with ease, even without the benefit of makeup. I can change my expression, my voice, my way of walking, even the appearance of my height. But makeup makes me unrecognizable. John still does not know that I have delivered his newspaper, served him dinner, and cut his hair, all without his knowledge. I am not in the least ashamed to say that I use him as a lab rat. If he does not recognize me in a particular getup, I'm fairly certain no one else will. It goes virtually without saying that I have fooled Lestrade some dozen times, made up as everything from a traffic warden to an insurance salesman.

John once asked me why I never became an actor. I'll admit the question was apt. Had he seen me at Cambridge, he would have known that I had a few brief, shiny moments on stage—Hamlet, Biff Loman, Tom Wingfield. I was successful. I could have become a professional. But acting was an addiction with no aftertaste. I liked it, I admit. I liked the rapid transformations into other people, the applause, the ability to alter the emotions of a room of people with a single line. It was a curious, heady power. But it wasn't enough.

Characters are like written mysteries, scripts the facts of the case. The problem is, scripts have endings, and characters are too solvable. Once I'd understood a role, I was ready for something else, but for an actor, that's when things begin, not when they end. The performances were like cocaine—strong, mindless, hard to give up. But give them up I did. I knew that I could never be satisfied by something so easy.

Being good at something doesn't make it one's destiny; sometimes the harder things are the right things. That's why.

But I still love a good disguise.

 

A.N. This chapter brings to light my one major beef with the "Sherlock" showrunners, who (in Series 1 and implied for the future) refused to have Sherlock employ traditional disguise, which is something he does constantly in the original canon and film adaptations. I am so annoyed by this glaring omission of a huge part of the character's resources that I try not to think about it very much ;) In the original canon, Watson also remarks at one point that Holmes is a good enough actor to be a professional at the highest level if he ever had the desire.


	27. Chapter 27

John thinks he got me into crap telly as he calls it. I let him think so; he seems to see it as some sort of personal victory, and I don't begrudge him that. But he's wrong. I liked trashy television long before I ever met John Watson.

I discovered it one day in my early twenties, a bored day, a day after the end of a case and before the beginning of another. I took up the television remote, something I never did, and tried to find something to engage my mind. The police procedurals made me shake my fist at the screen, the news was mundane, the cooking shows repulsed me. My hatred of television would be cemented once more, it seemed. But just before I switched it off and went to my laboratory to create an intentional explosion, I landed on a talk show. It was one of any number, but the subject was infidelity. I stared, transfixed, for a half hour, figuring out the secrets of the participants before the dramatic reveals. After that, I watched a program about people forced to live together in a house and another about a woman looking for romance in inner-city London. I had found a new love.

The thing about crap telly is that it doesn't even use actors. Most of the people are horrible at putting over things they don't mean, and no matter what a show's producers want me to think, I can easily detect the truth. Reality shows are like mini-cases, easy little puzzles, but puzzles nonetheless. I always know who the father is, who the bachelorette really likes even if she picks someone else, who is going to be thrown off the island or out of the house. I make my prediction and receive almost instant affirmation.

Until I met John, I had no idea people watched that kind of television as something other than an intellectual exercise in reading people and situations. I thought that's why it existed. As with many things, John showed me the common way of watching, and I found mine superior.

I don't think I'll tell him.

 

A/N: This chapter is dedicated to my dear friend AK, who inspired it.


	28. Chapter 28

Oh, the loathsomeness of the holidays, with crowds of people pressing in to gaze upon horrible decorations and hear primary schoolchildren sing terribly. It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that most holiday crimes are sadly mundane affairs-teenagers absconding with other people's Christmas gifts and the odd domestic dispute when families are forced into the same vicinity.

Of course, John, being the altogether sentimental man he is, is vastly fond of the holiday and insists that I compose a Christmas blog post for him. I consent in the Christmas spirit. Well, that and he's bringing me my very own bottle of eggnog.

Without further adieu, here are three things I hate about Christmas:

1\. Children: Most times of the year, I don't hate children any more than I hate adults. Some of them are quite clever. The problem is, the holidays bring out rashes of them doing all sorts of "talents" and "pageants" so treacly that one is liable to vomit simply from watching them. Fortunately, I've found a way to turn this to my advantage. I actually do attend pageants, much to the surprise of John and Mrs. Hudson, but I do it so that I can pick out which children are likely to be advantageous parts of the Baker Street Irregulars, my youthful eyes and ears in the city.

2\. Gifts: John is forever wanting me to make lists of things I want and expecting me to produce various superfluous items for those who surround me. I will never understand the popular prejudice against handing one another money or credit cards that allow us to purchase whatever we like. Better yet, we could all save our money and buy ourselves what we want.

3\. Comfort and Joy: How obnoxious it is that one is expected to be cheerful during the Christmas season, as if one's moods run according to the Roman calendar. During the month of December, I am subjected to all manner of back slaps and idiotic smiles and sugary confections, all with the object of making me "smile" or "feel the spirit of the season." Even Inspector Lestrade, who is usually at least reasonably sedate, takes to grinning and showing pictures of his spawn wearing ridiculous red caps.

The saving grace in all of this is that Christmas comes but once a year.


	29. Chapter 29

John Watson's Blog

Setting: Private

I know I'll regret lying. I count myself an honest man, honest to a fault sometimes, though I try to be kind. But I couldn't tell him.

I couldn't say the words that would empty him. I've seen him with empty eyes; so has Mycroft. That's why we lied. It's a sight as haunting as any specter. I couldn't sleep the first time-the time we lost a client he really cared about.

Before that, I hadn't known Sherlock could care. What showed me was the absence of something, not its presence. I looked up from a corpse to find my friend's eyes completely hollow, as if the man within had flown away somewhere else completely. It was a harrowing sight. I knew then why he used to take drugs.

That's why I made a decision to be dishonest, one I'll no doubt regret as long as I'm alive. I told him she was in America, not that a terrorist had taken her life in the worst of ways. I took the coward's way out, I guess. I couldn't bear to watch the emptying again. I wonder sometimes if he knows, but somehow it seems that not hearing the words protected him from feeling the pain.

I can keep that pain for him; goodness knows, plenty of times he's kept mine.


	30. Chapter 30

Dear Mrs. Hudson,

It has come to the attention of the Baker Street Neighborhood Watch that between the hours of 7-10 p.m. last night, a man was seen rocketing out of a window in your home several times at high speeds. We here at the Watch try to take a tolerant attitude toward eccentricities, but this, Mrs. Hudson, crossed the line. Allow me to remind you that the Watch was formed in 1997 for the "prevention of crime and promotion of peace" on Baker Street and to "protect its citizens from harm," to quote our mission statement. I'm sure that, like me, you cannot think that having living projectiles flung from your windows repeatedly is a peaceful or reputable gesture. Please, in future, refrain from allowing such disorderly activities to take place in your home, or the Watch will have to consider contacting the police for further action.

Yours,

Benjamin Slade

Chairman, Baker Street Neighborhood Watch

 

Dear Mr. Slade,

I am pleased to inform you that the incident you mention was an entirely one-off amusement. The gentleman who ricocheted from the window in question is highly unlikely to be visiting the area in future, and I do not foresee any of my lodgers taking up window-flinging as an ongoing hobby. Please feel free to inform the Watch that all shall be quiet from here on.

Yours,

Mrs. Hudson

Landlady


	31. Chapter 31

John Watson is the most average man I have ever known. His body is average; his hair is of average colour; his teeth are averagely straight and of average whiteness. He reads average books and average papers; he holds an average medical position. I have never known anyone so normal in habit or routine, so regular in the carrying out of his daily activities, be they work or recreation. In short, the sheer scope of John's averageness makes it unique.

I did not like average people when I was a child. The children of the village where I grew up were slow and dull, and they liked kickball and football better than reading and learning. Their parents were hardly better, and it was not long until I had a reputation as a strange child of a strange family. They had every right to dislike me, I thought, since I disliked them. We were in different worlds, other people and me.

When I got older, I met other geniuses. They were not as clever as I, but they were within closer proximity than most. I found them fascinating at times, but I did not care for them. They wanted to use me, most of them, to take what I am and reduce it to a set of brain cells. I didn't mind; I did the same to them. But after a while, they were boring in a different way, and I tired of them, and they of me. Once geniuses have competed, have scoped out who is the superior among them, there is little left.

After that, I was alone, and I didn't mind. But I deceive myself. I wasn't entirely alone. I had my needle and my cigarettes and my cases. The former comforted me when the latter failed.

That's how it was until John. I knew a flatshare couldn't just be a shared space. I'd never have chosen him just for the rent money. But I saw a poetry to John Watson when we first met. The harmony of every element of his exact averageness spoke to me like a perfectly crafted novel, the perfect story of someone so regular that he was entirely uncommon. I knew John Watson would suit.

And I was not wrong. John Watson is an average man, and he is an uncommon friend. I have never had one before.


	32. Chapter 32

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified five stages of grief:

1\. Denial

Sherlock Holmes is not the kind of person who commits suicide.

John has seen suicidal people, soldiers with no hope in their eyes who would rather eat bullets or step on landmines than face another day. He knows what it's like to talk someone away from the edge. He knows all the warning signs.

Sherlock didn't have any of them.

2\. Anger

How dare he? It's one thing to jump off a building and make your best friend watch; it's another to die with the word fraud on your lips, trying to convince him that everything about you is a lie. John's not having it. His disbelief is his protest.

3\. Bargaining

You can't bargain with stone. You can touch it and yell at it and soak it with your tears, but it won't answer. John Watson knows—he's tried.

4\. Depression

The flat is empty. It doesn't smell of chemicals. The kitchen table is covered with plates and silverware, not test tubes. All the clothes are in the closet; there is no coat thrown over a chair. It's as orderly as a mausoleum.

5\. Acceptance

At first, it seems like everything is the way it was before. You're alone again, and it's as if the past two years have been a dream. But then you realize—you're not the same. He changed you, and that's what gives you the strength to move on.


	33. Chapter 33

I tried to put an ad in the newspaper.

One flat, good-sized, no housekeeper.

I picked up the phone to call and place it, but I hung it up as soon as I heard a voice. The next day, I tried again. After seven times, a whole week, I gave it up.

I used to have two lodgers. Young men. Boys, really, even if they didn't know it. Not hard to replace, lodgers, not in London. I could have someone willing to pay in five minutes.

That's the problem.

You can replace a lodger, but you can't replace someone who shoots the wall and discolors the carpet. You can't replace someone who keeps you awake at night and brings all kinds of undesirables to your doorstep. You can't replace someone who would die for you in an instant, even though he'll hardly be bothered to have a conversation.

You can replace a lodger, but you can't replace a son.


	34. Chapter 34

Eight Bart's techs paid out of pocket.

One falsified autopsy.

One bouquet of flowers.

Two fake crying fits at the funeral, one at the graveside.

Three chats with Dr. Watson, one with Mrs. Hudson.

One fake breakdown at grief counseling.

Two dates turned down.

One lie to the police.

No thanks.

One moment of trust.

Plenty.


	35. Chapter 35

To:The Office of the Director of Scotland Yard

From:DI Gregory Lestrade

Dear Sir,

I simply will not have it.

For fifteen years, I've crossed every t and dotted every i on every piece of paperwork that has come across my desk. I haven't cut a single corner. I haven't complained when you've assigned me the forensics experts with the worst attitudes in the whole department and the most misanthropic female assistant in all of Scotland Yard. I never once asked for transfers or special favors. I'm not claiming to be brilliant. No one would call me that, least of all myself, but I've done my job, and I've been honest, nearly to a fault.

That's why I'm putting my foot down. I will not sign off on the report of the Holmes-Moriarty affair unless Sherlock Holmes is absolved of all wrongdoing. With both men dead and evidence nearly nonexistent, the department no longer has any reliable way of ascertaining where the fault actually lies. You've heard my explanation of the arrest of Holmes and my opinion that his subsequent escape was a matter of national security. If you cannot accept my word that the man was innocent, at least change the report to reflect the ambiguity in the investigation.

My staff has accused me of liking Sherlock Holmes. I have no intention of denying it. He was my friend and my colleague, one of the best I've ever known. Others will tell you he was not perfect. I'd ask them to find me a detective who is, whether in the Yard or out of it.

I'm sorry it's come to this, but I'm completely sure. I will resign before I will certify that Sherlock Holmes was a criminal. That is my final decision.

Sincerely,

Greg Lestrade


	36. Chapter 36

To sleep, perchance to Dream; Ay, there's the rub,  
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,  
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,  
Must give us pause.

-William Shakespeare

It's a funny thing to die, to find myself in a Purgatory of my own making, a man without an identity and with a face that must not be recognized. They say Purgatory is where the penitent are purged of sin; I begin to understand.

John and I never talked about death, but it was always with us, our third flatmate, the silent companion who watched us eat and talk and go about our lives. The strength of his presence made words unnecessary.

Before I met John, I welcomed death as a friend. After I met John, I began to learn that those who have seen death's work on a grander scale do not think so highly of him. It was not until I saw John's face, just before I jumped, that I finally understood.

Death is an insatiably jealous friend. He could not have me to himself, so he killed us both. There is more than one way to die.

After I died, I thought I was alone.

But there is a man who visits a gravestone every day. He is small. His has a limp from a wound that doesn't exist. Maybe's he's in Purgatory, too.


	37. Chapter 37

I may have underestimated Mrs. Hudson's value.

It's been some time since I've washed my own sheets, and having no perpetually-filled biscuit tin is more irksome than I'd imagined. They really ought to sell self-filling ones.

I bought one of those skulls from the joke shop, a plastic thing, and I must say, after having had John around for a few months, it really isn't the same.

After watching the entire run of The Big Bang Theory, I'm thinking of purchasing a cat. Sheldon Cooper has the right idea about things.

I should ask Molly around.

The fact that I even wrote the above is evidence that my brain is atrophying in solitude.

Where does Mrs. H get those finger-shaped biscuits with the pink icing? Shall commence mission to acquire them.

Have taken to sending Mycroft annoyingly cryptic anonymous letters. I hope he shows them to Lestrade.

John's had three girlfriends in the past month. Good to know he's not wasting time.

Crime hasn't risen since I died. Yet. What are the criminal classes thinking? It's a personal insult.

 

A/N: For all of you who asked for something humorous to break up the angst :)


	38. Chapter 38

John Watson's Blog

Setting: Private

Infinite Jest

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite  
jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a  
thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is!  
My gorge rises at it

.-Hamlet

I've started talking to a skull. How did that happen? The only other time in my life that I've talked to a skull was in sixth form, when Mrs. Hunt cast me as Hamlet in the school play. I hated it because I didn't understand it. The only character I connected with was Yorick, the king's jester and bearer of the long-dead skull. Maybe that preference said something about the profession I'd choose as an adult, one that constantly brings me face-to-face with death.

I've told it everything, all the things I no longer say to other people because they're no doubt tired of hearing them. I remind it daily that Sherlock Holmes was a good man, that Moriarty was the villain, and that the whole world has been deceived. I tell it stories about cases, the ones too important and too classified to write about, the ones when Sherlock was particularly clever. He was always clever.

Sometimes, late at night, when I've said everything again, I let myself hope. I know that I am not a particularly clever or unusual man, but there is a part of me that thinks back to my time with my friend and whispers that perhaps I was enough.

I could not solve his cases, but I could smile at his brilliance and show him that I understood. I could not scintillate his mind, but I could make him laugh. I could not win his battles for him, but I could help him fight. Goodness knows, I'd have given my life to save his, a thousand times if need be.

When I talk to the skull, I am talking to myself. Sometimes I feel like Yorick.

 

A/N: Many thanks to all my readers, both new and old. Some of you have been with this story for over a year now. Very special appreciation. If you have thoughts, requests, or ideas, please feel free to share. I plan to include more humorous chapters in the coming months, but I want to make sure I get the tone right and that our wonderful characters have plenty of time to grieve.


	39. Chapter 39

I go about my daily routine. Cup of coffee. Hour of paperwork. Two hours of emails. Return a few phone messages. Indifferent lunch from the cafeteria. People think police work is exciting, but most of it is just this—meaningless words, piles of them, covering my desk, filling my computer, clogging my brain.

Nobody at the Yard can understand why I haven't moved on. After all, I've lost friends. You can't be a lifelong cop without losing people. Good people. People you're close to. People you loved like family. That's just the way of the job.

No one knows why this time is different. Every other time, I grieved and commiserated with distraught family members and then carried on, because I knew that keeping up the fight was the best way to honor the memory of the dead. This time, though, I can't shake it. I can't stop the thoughts that keep me awake at night and distract me during the day. I don't laugh any more. My staff knows to stay away unless their questions are life and death.

None of them know that my mind replays it all over and over, the one time I didn't trust my instincts. My gut told ne it was all wrong, all a mistake, that somehow Sherlock Holmes was in the right. But I let myself be bullied, the way I promised myself I never would. I gave in.

As a young man, you have pacts with yourself, I type to no one in particular. You promise that you'll never give in, never sell out, even if it costs you everything. 

I'm an old man.


	40. Chapter 40

John Watson's Blog

The Patient Complaint

I had a patient complaint today at work, my first. No one really cared. Most of the clinic's physicians get complaints all the time. There's an allowable minimum.

I never get complaints. When you've held soldiers' hands as they gasped out their final breaths and tried to calm civilians so hysterical that sedatives don't quiet them, it's no longer difficult to listen politely to stories about runny noses and bunions and hives. Most of my job is making people feel like their aches and pains are important. I can do that. I like people.

Today was different. Today Mrs. Stoddard came in for her monthly asthma evaluation. I enjoy Mrs. Stoddard. She reminds me of my mother. As she settled in and started on a graphic description of her breathing difficulties, my gaze drifted out the window, a view that overlooks a very ordinary London street.

I saw him on the eighth floor of an office building across the road. Tall, thin, dark hair, and a certain way of moving. I blinked. And then I swore. I couldn't believe the universe would play that kind of trick on me. Of course it wasn't Sherlock. He's dead and buried. I watched him die.

"What did you say, Dr. Watson?" Mrs. Stoddard's voice wasn't enough to call me back. I repeated the word. She stormed out and filed an official complaint.

My first official complaint. No one cared, but I stared at the office building across the street for the rest of the day and never saw the man again.


	41. Chapter 41

John Watson's Blog  
The Prescription

It's been many months since I forced Sherlock to explain what he meant by his claim that friendship is a scientific thing. I have realized, since then, that we are not as different as we appear, were not as different as we appeared; we both applied our paradigm as we saw fit. He was a scientist; I was a doctor. Always and forever.

Sherlock saw a syllogism; I saw a prescription. The patient was dying—slowly fading away from listlessness and depression and the agony of feeling useless. Me. I was fading away. Sherlock Holmes was an extreme cure, but no less effective for his abrasiveness.

The other patient was eating himself alive, burning to embers because he had no one to soothe him, to calm him, to be a brick wall when he needed to be stopped. I, too, was medicine, though of a subtler sort.

I no longer think it absurd that Sherlock tried to quantify friendship in scientific terms. I understand now that to him, the willingness to define something and give it a logical framework was the highest possible compliment. He quantified what he valued.

Me, I never felt the need to quantify the prescription until it ran out.


	42. Chapter 42

"The frailty of genius is that it needs an audience."

I wish I hadn't said those words. I wish I hadn't flung them through space for John to catch, like some metaphorical game of tag. I know that saying something doesn't make it true. I am a scientist and a logician, not a motivational speaker.

But something changed when I said those words, something in me, as if they were the declaration of a long-felt but never-articulated need. What I saw I could not unsee. I could not escape the realization that I needed more than a skull and the occasional pat on the back from an affectionate landlady. I needed another mind.

Needing is the part of my humanity I have always despised the most. When I was a young child, my brother used to think it strange that I would suddenly rush to him in the blackest mood and launch myself at him. Perhaps another kind of brother would have wrestled, but Mycroft simply put his arms around me as if he didn't know what else to do. I would lean against him stiffly, my independence warring with my craving for human contact. I thought grownups were people who didn't need any more.

When I became one, though, I realized the truth, and I hated it in myself. For a time, I convinced myself that needing a syringe was somehow better than needing a human, as if the craving for something inanimate was less despicable than the craving for companionship. The reason I gave up the liquid, along with the peace it brought, was that I realized how severely wrong I was. Needing is needing, whether for a chemical or a person.

After I was free of drugs, I convinced myself that I could be content on my own. I am not an affectionate man, and I did not mind going for many months without the touch of another person. But there is another kind of aloneness. I did not understand it until I met John. Once I experienced the presence, I could no longer accept the absence.

That is why I compromised. That is why I forced myself to speak when I wanted to stay silent and to do small, unseen things to make my friend's life easier. I needed John, and for once, I did not castigate myself for it. We both had what we needed, and we could survive.

But I am dead now, and my friend is alone. I do not think he likes it any better than I do.


	43. Chapter 43

Sometimes I hear a violin, and I feel like I'm losing my mind. More often than not, it's a student practicing or someone listening to classical music on the radio. It's not like Sherlock, not really.

I could never decide if my flatmate was a virtuoso or an idiot. He was a composer. I'm no musical genius, but even I could tell he was good at it. He was also a child, playing in fits when he was upset, maddeningly and intentionally mucking up the notes to express his inner turmoil.

That was Sherlock, I guess. My best friend, who played me so clumsily I thought he was an idiot, until he died, and I realized what a virtuoso he really was.

Only a childlike idiot would flounce onto the couch in a tantrum and shoot the walls in boredom. Only idiots think they're cleverer than anyone else and refuse to be wrong. Only idiots—only they do things like throwing themselves off buildings when the whole world crashes in on them.

Except that when he died I realized that I missed his moods—they used to make me laugh. And I no longer had someone to look after, to make sure they didn't get into the secret cigarette stash or burn holes in the dining table.

He played us like his violin. Me, Mrs. Hudson, Molly. He played us so well he made us love him, and when his body hit the pavement I knew—I will miss that violin forever.

 

A/N: To Atlin Merrick, for all of your love and support.


	44. Chapter 44

There have been no danger nights since I wore my good coat to bid farewell to my short friend.

I have solved mysteries; no one has chronicled them.

The teapot is always half full when I finish.

I speak; no one answers.

No one catches my fountain pen.

I compose; no one listens.

My only audience is the half-light of dusk in the window.

Since I said goodbye, there have been no danger nights. Only nights when I gave in.


	45. Chapter 45

Sherlock

My obituary contained three (unintentional) factual errors, five grammatical errors, and incorrectly referred to me as a grifter when it meant fraudster. Unsurprisingly, the Evening Standard can't even report incorrect information correctly.

Molly 

It went in just like he said. I bought five copies. I thought—I thought maybe we could laugh about it some day. Or something. Oh, I don't know.

Mycroft

I wrote Sherlock's death notice, of course, in the paper's usual abysmal style. All the more likely to be believed by the public.

Lestrade

I've written a letter to the editor! I won't stand for this kind of shoddy journalism, with the case not even concluded! I'll have an officer on them if they don't print a correction. I'll do it!

Mrs. Hudson

I can't read mine any more. I've cried too much, and the tears make the ink run.

Donovan

Best thing in the Standard I've seen this year. I have it clipped to my refrigerator, just so I can look at it after a bad day.

John

Was there something in the paper? I never looked.


	46. Chapter 46

Yesterday, I told the wall I was hungry.

You can't shoot walls here, or you'll be evicted. Not that I care about being evicted, but it's a lot of trouble to look for a new place, especially when you don't have a flatmate to do it for you and you're trying to maintain a fictional identity.

Still, I like to think I improved the fetid place I lived right after I died. I shot V.R. into the wall for "Victoria Regina." Somehow I didn't feel like shooting the same design as usual. No one knew what it meant. Funny how angry it made them all. Not like shooting a hole could hurt that place any.

After that, I went to a place where the wallpaper was peeling beautifully. The conditions were perfect for an experiment on the way different chemicals affect the speed with which adhesives detach from cement. Apparently, Mrs. Matthewson downstairs "smelled something."

So here I am. This place looks like the other two. It's a perfectly adequate shelter for living in. But there is something wrong. I don't know when I started to care about the walls of a place, to regret things that hung on other walls I used to know, to miss the taps I could hear through other walls, light taps that meant an old woman's feet and heavier ones, but only a bit, that meant a doctor's.

No place is another place, and no set of walls is exactly the same as another. I have always known this, and it has never mattered until now. One night soon, I will shoot "221b" into this wall, and I will go find a new home once again.

 

A/N: Thanks to everyone who's still with me and still with "Sherlock."


	47. Chapter 47

Dear Weezie,

Remember when we were little and we wanted to be pirates when we grew up? I don't think we were alone after all.

I almost tripped over a guy on the fire escape today. He was sitting halfway up, reading. I didn't see him until I had almost fallen on his head because I'm oblivious like that. Anyway, I looked down, and he was reading Treasure Island like it was the world's most important book.

I felt like a total idiot, and I didn't know what to say, so I just blurted out "Pieces of Eight." You know, like the parrot in the book. I don't know what possessed me. My usual charm and finesse, I guess.

The guy looked really irritated for a second, but when he'd realized what I said, his face changed. I don't know how to explain it. He's one of those people with a face that looks like it's not from this earth, all angles and cheekbones and unearthly beauty. But when he heard me, he turned into a six-year-old boy. He grinned. It was the most abandoned grin I've ever seen, as if all of the severity in him turned to absolute joy. I've never seen anything like it.

I kept walking. I felt awkward enough as it was, standing over him in a space barely big enough for one of us. I didn't mind, though. I think he was another pirate, like you and I. Too bad we didn't know him when we were kids.

Love,

Leez

p.s. No, he's not my type at all.


	48. Chapter 48

Christmas Without

The therapist—she says I shouldn't be thinking about it like this any more. I have family and friends coming over, even somebody who might be more than a friend. She's nice.

It's not like last Christmas was that great. I spent it trying to keep Sher—you know, I spent it trying to keep him from taking drugs over Irene Adler's death. She wasn't even dead. That's how things were with him. There was also that horrible party, the one where he scarred Molly Hooper for life and then kissed her, just like a ten-year-old boy who didn't know what to do. That's also how things were with him.

The therapist says it's been long enough now, that a friend, a colleague, a flatmate, should start to be a fond memory, stagnant and pleasant in my brain. But with Hol—with him, nothing was ever stagnant or pleasant. No memories like that exist.

It's not that I mind spending Christmas without him. That's what the therapist can't get through her head. It's hard to explain, and I guess I'm not doing a very good job. But the thing is, she never saw the Christmases before Sherlock.

She never saw me sitting alone with a bottle and a gun. She knows, but she doesn't understand.

Sher—Sherlock, my friend, my flatmate—he's the reason I helped Mrs. Hudson string silly lights and decorate a tree. He's why there's a box of Christmas crackers waiting for Christmas Eve dinner. He's why Molly and Lestrade are coming to my place this year. I've even invited my sister—if she'll come.

I don't mind Christmas without Sherlock Holmes. It's not that at all. It's just that—if I'd never known him, I wouldn't be alive enough to have Christmas at all.


	49. Chapter 49

Cassandra

I'll never post this.

When I was fifteen, my school put on a play called Agamemnon. They cast me as Cassandra, a woman who is cursed to see the future and speak it, but never be believed by anyone. People said I was amazing. It must have been my horror.

I couldn't imagine, when I was fifteen, what could ever be worse than knowing a truth and trying to make people believe it, but also knowing that no matter how much you say or how hard you try, no one will ever listen.

I don't need to imagine any more.

Last Christmas, I bought a new dress for a party, and I wore it for a man I knew would never look at me. He kissed my cheek, but it was the kiss of a little boy trying to apologize for something he didn't really understand.

Then he died. I mean, there was a lot in between. There was even the time he proved to me, once and for all, that he really did consider me his friend. He proved it by needing me.

He died, but he didn't die. That's why I can't post this. That's not what I try to tell people.

I've told the police, the Times, a few tabloids. I've told them all over and over. Sherlock Holmes was a good man. Sherlock Holmes did what he did because it was the right thing to do. He never lied the way they said. He didn't need to.

I've seen him working, hour upon hour, and I know it was real. I've watched him sacrifice food and sleep to save someone, over and over, not that he'd ever admit it.

I've loved him, and that's really how I know, not that I tell anyone that part.

When you love the way I've loved Sherlock Holmes, you know someone, just as surely as poor Cassandra knew the fate of the men of Troy. No one cares what I know.

I wish—I wish sometimes that I could go back and play her again.

 

A/N: Inspired by Loo Brealey's article in which she mentioned playing Cassandra.


	50. Chapter 50

Drew's Computer (To be encrypted)

Dear Mr. Holmes,

Mummy doesn't read post unless it gets sent in the mail, so I decided I could write you again. I saw your picture online, and Mummy wouldn't tell me anything about it for a long time. Then she said that you were a bad man and that is why you died.

I know Mummy is wrong because you made the men with the bombs go away. Mummy says you were the one who made the bombs and everything, but that doesn't make any sense. I saw those men, and they didn't like you or anything. They were just bad, and you were the one who saved me.

You said I was clever before, so I thought maybe if Mummy is wrong about one thing, she could be wrong about two things. Maybe you're not dead. That's why I'm typing this letter as a comment on your website, in a code I read about in a magazine.

I hope you're alive.

Love,

Drew

Guest Comment (Thursday, 7pm):

ZZZZZ TXSRD HJBKH PBPBU MDKTU PKSVQ DDFEC ABBSJ CDJDT NAGVB AULVC

PRPVK DNLFC XTCSS MUMDM AWJNU PEAQK ROXAO DPHJN PAKLA PFSUT GMEDW

HTEGA WRIFD VVQHJ XDNID CVSPA UEXJT HJTWG JOJIS GNEQB NPROU MKQLN

ISTMM CMFIK WINDJ KEVXQ AVJRA JDEOC AMQBU IWGPJ DGANI DRPLV XJEIU

SNWJX SCBEN WQWOV PEJIX XTXDP SIXQU QSCES EQLAA KLSHK MKPVL GAAOW

ETWIM FSXWK GCSDV KFUNW UVMOD WRJOJ NCGWN MDIIE SFGOI UGRXU OEIFQ

FBGEH EWRPB EVQNF KCQWE ETEST PPGRP XIMIE LDRRD LALOU GJIOL HVJBS

OORWP IAXWR FOAQI FVEDH BBJXC RBSBJ TLPIR VCCWC SRICO XTSTS VKTVH

KSVNG KKPXX HRJAS RIJXA KEQQS XDQDE XGQDO OXIHU DXRIX ODPPI CBEGF

DTVCN KEIGH RAAIC USUUW JATSX UBOEU IEBRE OBREA JHDDV GREUI EMJOC

FREBN SWRQG CLJHC OFREO TBDHM OOCKD TKESX ADCIU QMMCW JNQBI RHDKN

NNENF QIFGV SHAJG KLTUJ JSABK TDTTQ LXPFX QKSCO RUOKB LHQUL ABCLW

BRNRG QVNKR KFWIE JGIRF BXKFC VFTIL HKVGW TXLGI OCLTH JRPGW MLKMB

CLAXX DOTME OEWRL QLXGX QQRGT XIESE KPABV UUOVL RQOPL NTVST OKUBQ

NKICO APSUP BFPTQ MKMDN OGXCJ LPDXA VVKBV QQAMW PVHMR NKAEU TMAFV

QCWNK SAPUH BUNMW JWIOF PWKUM JDVET JMAXM WNKOF OISPA FEVKN IBSBF

DUELM UOUQM FXABF EWLOR VHTBE IVDFE DVIMP KRPHI WALJA QLWAM OKHDN

AMUOW AXUDJ LPOVH SOOPW FTKCV FCCQL DJSIF XBQBH HMRNI NJMXM JCHEJ

FOMBA DSVSC SELEE VLCTO IFRFM OOEVR UEHLT CXLLF PPLVL IUVWR BQIMD

IVKED PUXIV KDGAS AMFJF RVKMJ CFCNU GOXBI STRIN PEHMW XKOXS XKQGB

NQFVB WJVQJ NPAGU UXXIQ DJQRV SVGRJ GHPXV LWSNJ LUOOU XXDJR NVGJA

UOHJF SKPMW QIEBT DIUAS RPKLA EHTAV WTPCQ JDPGG PQRER UGMAG PLFKV

COPNU LXQWE PVFJE CETAM NRVJN VPQER XSMCH NTNAU JKTQG TQTJO ACDHH

ILLDU RQTTO VACSS QSVLM UPEJO IWDSJ PTRRP MLMUH PXMCX FHMRU LSBMA

ALXDH HXVEQ WTSXD VAFVP MQHLA QRRXX SAUOC WUXVM KUVGK THOTT LUEWO

OEBDP SOIGN GMVEJ ONBIP NWHUQ LLSQT IXICK CMPBH SMLRL KWJBJ DVVXO

CEMDQ RSDEG RQHIG ARIGB EKPHX WIJHK SAFST VQMAG BUGNM MJQBG PWMJQ

ARKMS CRXPO TIDIL FFBTD JGTOE HOJSM OXBCS MOIBW INWPP MHFPI NJEXT

HGCUW UVDMV UFBNN EDFTS SOUSW VNQQV HTRIO VWNLO KJUPX FABHB GAVWP

DLUDX XAQQF WHGCW WNOJE JAEAM MCXCD AAUFK RLPFV FVGDG XCBQE SHIOI

FHCUU DLDRO RDQBQ RXCMX MCVNP JNOXU SPVQN FNULA IWPXF FEPKQ JJXQD

BQJOM DXODD IRNWA IDKFT UTJDM PQMQV WCMEE DGBJR AWKMN OTHIN UXDRW

GLPUA YYYYY

 

Public Computer (To be encrypted):

Drew,

I'm alive, and you're still clever.

S.H.

Reply to Guest Comment (Friday, 1am):

ZZZZZ VLHSE FAQHI SINRN JPKIQ XBHCW TFDJW RUEIM WDPGV FHMPQ SPLUN

ABPBI KTHGA JFPVD JBGBH IWQRB UIPPA JNCOW MVDKR BSXIN MMJLL INQHA

MBMBX QVTQD VAUDB FEDOM PTLJJ OGFON JVBBU KIOJU AEOND TFLFR BQXTO

XBUPD BDALI TRRBO HDAST IPXQV MXUEG KXZZZ YYYYY

 

Drew's Computer (to be encrypted)

Dear Mr. Holmes,

I thought so.

Love, Drew

Guest Comment (Saturday, 8pm):

ZZZZZ AQUVF JWPXF TEJEO JENIT TLHEP XUHMC WGAIT GIQSV EHAVW ATHGM

XDPJE ALNOC TKFGN BCXXM XHJQR KCTTK PQMAU JCGKN PVEGO VFVQM KPWWF

HSETV NNJRB DPLIE EFULH QWTGW UQTEX MTSCT HNSUE HNRNJ SSISU DNSIS

YYYYY

 

A/N: Thanks to the exciting stories code generator.


	51. Chapter 51

John Watson's Blog

Sherlock's website is active. Maybe it was the police. I have no idea. Some kind of weird codes back and forth. I thought they'd have closed the site by now, but Lestrade said they were hoping to catch anyone who'd been working with him.

You'd think I wouldn't care. But I still have that email thing on—the thing that notifies me any time somebody comments on Sherlock's site. I had it installed so that I could annoy him until he commented back to people. Now I don't know how to get it off.

I wish it was one of those badly-worded fake messages about African unclaimed funds. But it isn't; it's a code. Just like the kind of thing—the kind of thing he would have liked. I'm sure it's some Internet trolls with nothing better to do.

It would have been just like him to read a comment in code and respond back with the exact same code, just to prove he was clever enough to figure it out.


	52. Chapter 52

John Watson's blog says he called me The Woman until he died.

I laughed out loud the first time I read it.

I don't like men. I never have. Most of them strike me as simple, selfish, and uninteresting. I've ruined the careers of some and the private lives of others. I've never needed one a single time.

I lied. I'm good at that. It used to be true, but it isn't any more.

One time, I needed a man. One time I knelt on the sand somewhere. I didn't even know where I was. I thought I was going to die. I felt pure terror. I've never felt that before.

I lied again.

The only other time I've felt terror like that was when I was nine and my father went for a metal bar instead of his leather belt. I thought I was going to die then, too. But I could outrun him, and that's what I did. That's what my life was, outrunning my father's breath and threats and blows.

I ran so fast no one could catch me, until it all unraveled.

Sherlock Holmes was my undoing. He was the reason they gathered around me with hot breath that reminded me of my father's and whispered what they would do to my corpse once they had divorced it from my life.

I knew then that he had won. Not because of the threats or peril or the terror. He had won by making me need. I had sought to make him need me, and he had turned my scheme on its head.

My last text was to tell him that I knew I had lost.

But Sherlock Holmes isn't a man like other men. The one time I needed him, he came.

Perhaps—some might say that I won after all, won by making him want to come, want to be there at that moment. But I know better. He came because he was a better man than anyone believed.

I will never believe what anyone says about him. I know what he was.

To Irene Adler he is always The Man.


	53. Chapter 53

John Watson's Blog

Of Mustaches and Deerstalkers

Last night, I fell asleep watching some mystery on the BBC. It was set a while ago, one of those period pieces that win all the Baftas. All I could think about was how much it would have annoyed Sherlock and how he'd have solved the case in about ten minutes, tech or no tech. He was that clever. He WAS that clever. I don't care what anyone says, or doesn't say.

Anyway, I had this really strange dream. Sherlock was wearing that silly deerstalker hat he hated so much, and I had a huge mustache. We were dressed like the detectives in the drama I was watching, except Sherlock also had on a giant cape, and I had my gun, but it looked more like my great-granddad's service revolver than mine.

We were inside Baker Street, but Sherlock's beakers and test tubes had changed into a huge contraption with all sorts of glass globes and apertures. It was elegant, like something from a chemistry museum.

"What are you staring at, Watson?" Sherlock's voice was the same as ever, that curious, too-fast mixture of annoyance and affection.

"You look—well," I said, rather stupidly.

"Of course. I am always well," he snapped, "just like it's always 1895." Then he smiled, and I woke up, feeling like I'd been home, for the first time in over a year.

I don't really blog any more. Not since—not since he's been gone. But I'm thinking of taking up detective fiction. And I'm definitely growing a mustache. It suited me.


	54. Chapter 54

John Watson's Blog

When I was a child, we always celebrated bonfire night at my Granddad's house. He was a soldier, Granddad, the kind that stormed the beach at Normandy. He wasn't one of those people who won't ever talk about what happened to them. He always said it was worth it. That's why, after I became a doctor, I became a soldier, too.

Every bonfire night, we would go to his strange little cottage in the country, bundled up in our autumn sweaters, and Grandma would make us hot cocoa while he told us the story of Guy Fawkes, the man who tried to blow up parliament.

When he'd worked Harry and me into a fevered pitch of excitement, we would finally be allowed to tramp outside, where he and dad would make a giant fire. The effigy itself was Grandma's domain. She would sew ridiculously elaborate clothes and stuff them with straw, finishing with a grotesque mask at the top that would make my sister shriek with laughter.

The only other person I ever knew who liked bonfire night that much was Sherlock Holmes. It's not that he was sentimental. In fact, when I first knew him, I was completely thrown off by how excited he was by it. After utterly disdaining his own birthday, Christmas, New Year's, and anything else that could be called a holiday, the month of November rolled around, and he was like a child waiting for Father Christmas.

"John!" he said, as we sat around the flat one evening in companionable silence, "it's nearly Guy Fawkes Day!" I stared at him. I hadn't celebrated the night in years, except maybe to grab a pint with a few mates.

"So it is," I answered. With childlike glee, my friend sprung from the sofa and went to his room, from whence soon issued a lot of clanking and banging. He didn't come out again that night, which was hardly unusual.

The next day, my curiosity got the better of me. I asked Mrs. Hudson why my flatmate was so uncharacteristically excitable. "Goodness, dear, I've no idea," she said. "It's always like this every November. He's just like a little boy." Not for the first time, I began to wonder if Vulcans actually existed, if Holmes was one, and if Pon Farr was a real thing.

Finally, on November 3, I caved. "Sherlock," I said, handing him tea in hopes that it would tame the savage beast, "why are you so excited about bonfire night?"

"Fires, John! Everyone drinking alcohol! Effigies!"

"Ye-es?" I answered.

My flatmate shook his head at my slowness and produced a folded piece of paper, on which was written a list of things that were unfamiliar to me. Things like, "combustion point" and "flammability under stringent conditions."

"Are these science experiments?" I ventured.

"Exactly!" he replied. "These are all the experiments I'm going to perform on bonfire night, the only night of the year when no one will notice or object."

"I didn't think you cared about people's opinions," I rejoined.

"I don't," he said, his lip curled, "but these are things that have gotten me arrested in the past when I tried to do them on other nights."

"Oh," I answered.

"Will you be in tomorrow afternoon?" he asked suddenly. "Someone should be, and I have an appointment."

"Why?" I asked.

"That's when the morgue is delivering the body, of course. It's not as if I can experiment without something to experiment on. Don't be so dull, John."

"Oh," I said again, closing my mouth.

That fifth of November was the first time I ever drank hot cocoa before burning a corpse in the street. It was more fun than you might imagine.

 

A/N: This month marks the third anniversary of this story's beginning. Thanks to everyone who's come along for any of the ride. It's been fun, and I can't wait for Sherlock Series 3 to give me a whole new host of things to write about!


	55. Chapter 55

A/N: This chapter is dedicated to everyone who writes about Sherlock Holmes. Thank you.

 

John Watson's Blog

The Why Question

Sometimes people ask me why. Why did I ever choose to write about Sherlock Holmes? After all, I'd had a blog for a while, at my psychologist's insistence, and I hadn't really done anything with it before I met my friend.

That's just it. I didn't write before because I had nothing I cared to write down. I mean, why does anyone write? I can't explain that for everyone else, just for me.

I wrote about Sherlock because he was brilliant, and I wanted to capture the nuances of his genius. I wrote because he was brave enough to stare death down without so much as a blink. I wrote because he was funny, because of all the things he would never do, like taking out the trash or buying the milk. I wrote because I liked him.

The difference between writing and not writing is caring enough about something that it fills you up inside until it has to come out onto a piece of paper or a computer screen. That's how Sherlock was—my flatmate, my best friend, the greatest man I've ever known.

I think, deep down, that we're all artists. Sherlock's art was in his deduction, the beautifully reasoned pathways of thought that could take him from a single stain on a rug to the arrest of a wanted criminal. I'm a good doctor, but that's not my art. James Boswell was a good lawyer, but he didn't find his art until he met Samuel Johnson.

Some people say you shouldn't try, that there's no point in writing things down if you're not going to be a bestseller like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. I say hogwash to that. Writing happens when you care about something so much you can't bear not to frame it in words.

Sherlock Holmes made me a writer. For that, I will forever be grateful.


	56. Chapter 56

A/N: This chapter and the ones following will contain spoilers for whatever episodes of Sherlock have aired in the UK. Read at your own risk. 

Bonfire

The irony was blinding.

I used to love celebrating Guy Fawkes Day with John. We would burn corpses in the street—strictly for scientific purposes, you understand. It took a little while for John to warm up to the idea (pardon the pun), but he got into it as much as I did after a while. It was my favorite holiday, the only one I really liked.

I don't know—I'm not sure I'll ever look at it the same way again, not since someone made my best friend part of a Guy Fawkes bonfire. Funny, in the past it would have been the mystery of it all that bothered me the most, but now it's the danger. I can't afford to lose him, not again.

I'm coming at this all wrong, or, at least, that's what John would say. I'm meant to be writing about coming back, coming home, taking up residence again in 221b, drinking Mrs. Hudson's tea, solving crimes. This is meant to be a post to say I'm sorry.

I've never been good at saying that.

I don't know about people. I mean, I know their shoe sizes and their hair colors and the way the wrinkles in their shirts tell the stories of work weeks. And now I know a woman. Not The woman. Just a woman. John's woman.

She's lovely. I don't know much about people, but I know that.

I'm sorry, John. I apologize, old friend, for the fact that when I try to write what I feel—to do penance for two whole years, my feelings become a bonfire inside, a fire as hot as the one that threatened to consume you.

I rescued you, but you know, of course, that you've always been the one who rescued me.


	57. Chapter 57

/N: This chapter and the ones after it contain spoilers for whatever Sherlock episodes have aired in the UK. 

Right Hook

I don't punch people very often. In fact, I count myself a remarkably patient and nonviolent man, except when the situation is life or death, and I expect most people would react violently then. I certainly don't go around starting fights or assaulting my friends.

Except, knowing Sherlock's isn't the same as being a normal person's friend. I didn't punch him once. I punched him lots of times. I'm not really sure how many. I lost track somewhere between the bakery and the street.

I should probably start at the beginning, though the punching strikes me as the most important part of it all. There's really no point in commenting that a normal person wouldn't reveal himself after two years' absence (and supposed death) by crashing his best friend's date. I mean, a normal person wouldn't have faked his death for two years in the first place.

I suppose I must not be normal either, since I forgave him—the moment I saw him, though it was a while before I admitted it. He may have waited two years and put me through things I don't ever want to think about again, but, well, I asked him for one thing—to stop being dead—and he gave it to me. Can't really ask for more than that.

Somewhere, mid-punch, when I had him by the neck, I realized something. You wouldn't punch a friend for doing what Sherlock did. You wouldn't care enough. But you'd smack the stuffing out of your brother for it.

I'm not one bit sorry.


	58. Chapter 58

A/N: This chapter and the ones following contain spoilers for any episodes of Sherlock that have aired in the UK.

Good and Great

Once, a long time ago, I said that I thought Sherlock Holmes had the potential for greatness in him. I may not be the most brilliant police mind of my generation, but I know people. I know them, and I understand them, and I know when to say "happy new year" to their "meretricious." What I mean is, I know when to stage a drug bust to get what I want and when to just look the other way and give someone the benefit of the doubt.

I knew they would eventually clear Sherlock's name, but it was too late. He'd already hit the pavement. I spent months angry, then months depressed, and finally, I clinked glasses with poor Anderson and put Sherlock to rest. I had to finally let go, or I'd have lost my mind.

Sometimes, I would still let myself think about it, about the fact that at the very end of Sherlock's life, I had finally begun to see flashes of the man I knew he could become. Gold is refined by fire, and goodness cannot become more without adversity to melt the impurities out of it.

I had fire in my hand when his shadow fell across me. I looked up and saw greatness staring back at me. Sherlock Holmes returned the man I'd always known he could be.


	59. Chapter 59

A/N: This chapter will contain spoilers for Sherlock Series 3, Episode 3.

Redbeard

Redbeard is dying. It's time to put him down.

Redbeard is a dog, or is he a pirate? No, he's a consulting detective with an international reputation.

His stomach feels strange, light, like the red balloon his mother bought him on his sixth birthday, the one he tied to his wrist when he ran along the beach with Redbeard by his side. He was a strange little boy. He didn't know it then; no one had told him. He counted the waves and watched the sunbathers and noticed things about them. He liked noticing things. He thought everyone noticed things. Mycroft did, and he was all the boy knew of other people. That was before, when things were perfect, when it was him, Redbeard, and stories about pirates that Mycroft would read to him at night, his tired head pillowed on his brother's soft stomach.

Redbeard is dying. It's time to put him down.

Redbeard is a feeling, or is he a memory? No, he's a brain discovering its heart.

His head feels heavy, like the first time he tried cocaine, the experiment that turned into years. The calm that settled over him as the drug coursed through his veins was like the peace that came from putting his hands through a puppy's fur, but there was no puppy any more. He was long gone. They put him down, and they never told the boy until it was too late. He was angry; then he felt nothing. He didn't feel anything for so long that the feelings the drug brought were like the sun coming out. But only for a moment; then they brought crashing storms into his brain. He had keep using to keep those storms at bay.

Redbeard is dying. It's time to put him down.

Redbeard is a brother, or is he a friend? No, he's a man.

His heart feels full, like the day John called him his best friend, the day he couldn't figure out what to say. He's nearly died before, but he's never had a reason to come back. He wouldn't mind dying, he thinks, not at the end of Mary's gun, but he'd rather live. For the first time, he'd rather live. The moment of epiphany is the moment he realizes that his willingness to die is entwined with his determination to live.

Redbeard is gone. It's time to wake up.

Redbeard is a dog, and Sherlock is a little boy in a mind palace with stairs.

So many stairs. It's not time to die, not any more. It's time for the pirate to take his wooden sword and fight the dragons, time for the boy to remember what it was that made him give up the syringe, time for the man to run back to those who make him feel. It's time to live.


	60. Chapter 60

A Girl's Name

John Watson's Blog

Phrase: Sherlock is really a girl's name.

Tone: Tentative, with a hint of brittleness behind it.

Probable Result: Tears.

Deduction: Some words mean something other than their definitions.

He thinks he hasn't taught me anything, but he's not the only one who can deduce things, him with his shirt collars and his attempts to act like he doesn't care.

I don't know if he cried. I was thinking about myself, about the way I knew I would sob into Mary's shoulder the moment I got back into the car.

You might think I'd be used to it, losing Sherlock Holmes. I did it once before. Funny, the second time is harder.

"John is a girl's name, too," I wanted to say, since we were speaking in code. But all I could do was shake his hand as I said goodbye, the long, thin hand of the best man I've ever known.


	61. Chapter 61

Serviettes

Folding, twisting, a pinch just so. There's an intricacy to origami I'd never appreciated until I came across a video of a girl called Lisa doing serviettes for her best friend's wedding. It was the "best friend" that caught my ear. John had said I was his best friend, and I surely wasn't going to be outdone by a receptionist from Leeds.

The task wasn't difficult. I felt a zen, hypnotic feeling take me over as row upon row of Sydney Opera Houses formed under my hands. I didn't realize until after the wedding what it all meant. It hit me after I'd given my toast—hopefully not too much of a hash of things—and looped my scarf against the cold as I went out into the night.

I'm not much for ceremony, and tokens mean very little to my calibrated mind. How was it, I wondered, that what went through my mind as I left John's and Mary's day was the sight of those serviettes? Mary had given them pride of place, you see—used them to decorate the gift table.

Before that time, I had not known what friendship was. Oh, of course I had known friendship—or, at least, John said I had. And John is always right about these things. He said I was his best friend, so I knew that I must be. And that he must be mine. But I had not known how to explain the thing.

It was when my feet hit the pavement of Baker Street that my mind, that strange attic with its winding stairs and secret rooms, finally made the connection I needed.

Friendship is serviettes, I thought. It's serviettes and a cane—no longer needed. It's a pillow. It's an RAMC mug half-filled with yesterday's Assam. It's a punch in the jaw. 

My error had been in trying to understand how John—and Mary, too—had changed my entire life. When I thought about it like that, it seemed they hadn't. I was still the same cold, logical, reasoning machine with its need for stimulation and craving for adventure. I still hated and loved my brother, resented and adored my parents. It seemed I was the same as I'd always been.

And yet I wasn't the same. Not at all.

That night, wearier from a wedding day than a week of casework, I realized the truth: Friendship, when it is deep and lasting, does not paint in vast brushstrokes. It does not color our existence with huge swaths of new pigment. Friendship is a delicate artist. Day after day, hour upon hour, it paints tiny strokes onto the surfaces of our lives until we wake up one morning and find that we have been completely and permanently altered by its presence in our lives.

The smallest of folds turns a mundane serviette into a work of art, and the smallest of tokens comprise a friendship. I have been told before that I have a heart of stone. They say that the smallest trickle of water, given enough time, can bore a hole in the toughest of rocks.


	62. Chapter 62

The Surgeon and the Doctor

John is a doctor, and I am a surgeon.

We have both killed, he on the battlefield, me in encounters with people who gave me the intimacy of breathing their last full breaths upon my face before I sent them from the earth.

John has nightmares; so do I. When I cannot sleep, he wraps his arms around my growing stomach where his unborn child rests, and I let the steady rhythm of his heartbeat chase away the visions of things I cannot forget. When he cannot sleep, I rub the tenseness from his shoulders and talk of nothing in order to banish the shadows from his mind.

We are small people, John and I, in everything but courage. He showed his when he saved Sherlock Holmes. I showed mine when I dared to tell him who I really was. He told me that the night he shot the cabbie was the most terrifying of his life. For me it was the day in the Holmes family home when I finally let him see me as I am. We both knew that courage is not an absence of fear, but staring it down and blowing it to kingdom come.

We neither of us love easily. I chose solitude. He chose countless relationships with women who meant nothing to him. The purpose was the same, to escape the terror of vulnerability. We neither of us succeeded, once we'd met each other. We felt into one another in a mad rush of needing that grew so big it devoured us alive. They say, those who don't know him, that Sherlock is the one who avoids love. But they're wrong. He gave his heart to each of us the moment we met him, in his maddeningly complicated and charmingly simple way. It was John and I who were too stupidly sophisticated and too damaged to give into the transparency of love until we'd nearly lost each other.

We both saved Sherlock Holmes with a bullet, did John and I. The doctor saved his patient by killing the infection that was about to goad him into taking his life. I performed surgery on the patient himself. I never meant John to know my terrible skill, but when he finally understood, it bound us together like the handfasting that was part of the ancient marriage rite. Deeper than til death do us part, because we have both faced death, and life is a far more frightening promise.

Sherlock is the one who says that when the impossible is eliminated, the truth remains, however improbable it may seem. John is a doctor who has become a detective, and I am a surgeon who has become a mother. We are neither of us given to hoping, but I have begun to wonder if we should be.


	63. Chapter 63

Brothers

It was Mycroft, strangely, who asked the question. He rarely asks questions to which he wants an answer; he's given to the rhetorical. I suppose I should find it comforting that there exist a few things even he doesn't know and can't reason toward.

"Why Magnussen?" he asked. "Why did you risk everything over him? You have fought many dragons, Sherlock, but none of them, not even Moriarty, made you so recklessly disregard your own interests."

He rarely asks; I answer even more rarely. This time, alone with him in the Stranger's Room of the Diogenes Club, I did.

"Remember Redbeard," I said, as I stood up to leave.

It was an admission of something between us that is more forbidden that guilt—attachment, caring, compassion. When I was a child, I loved a dog. When I became a man, I did not put away childish things the way people think I did. I never made myself a machine. The truth is, the whole world became Redbeard, and I became its defender.

Journalists, of the hack variety, call me Vulcan, but they don't know what it means. I am Vulcan in the truest sense; I feel too strongly to let myself feel often.

I felt the night I shot Magnussen.

I can hear, in the back of my mind, the questions: Why admit such a thing to Mycroft? Wouldn't he use it against me?

He would like me to think so, but there are some things I am better at than my brother.

In a corner of his library, in the back room of his pristine flat, there is a single volume among the towering collections of classics and lawbooks. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. My brother never cared for pirates. He has, nonetheless, read the book half a dozen times, seated on the edge of a single bed occupied by a boy and a dog.

There are things I know that Mycroft doesn't know. If Magnussen had threatened me that night, he would have killed the man without a single thought.

When I was a child, I loved a dog. When Mycroft was a child, he loved me. He is taller now, but remarkably few things have changed.

 

A/N: This month marks the fourth anniversary of The Science of Friendship. I still believe in Sherlock Holmes, and I still believe in the kindness, generosity, and creativity of a fandom that spans the globe and continues to share its brilliance and joy with the world.


	64. Bon Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mr. Wilkinson left his corpse to science. He didn't say how. That's what I told myself while I drove the morgue van to 221b Baker Street. Normal people don't have parties with corpses. Normal people are not Sherlock Holmes. They're not me, either.

Bon Fire

Mr. Wilkinson left his corpse to science. He didn't say how. That's what I told myself while I drove the morgue van to 221b Baker Street. Normal people don't have parties with corpses. Normal people are not Sherlock Holmes. They're not me, either.

Usually, I go out with a couple of female friends for Guy Fawkes. You know, dinner at the little café down the street from my flat, maybe a glass or two of wine. I don't usually get invited to Baker Street. Of course, I knew as soon as I got Sherlock's text, that he wanted something on top of my company. I didn't realize it was going to be a fresh corpse. I should have.

I texted Dr. Watson before I accepted. I mean, some people might think it was in slightly poor taste to plan a bonfire for the anniversary of the night their best friend almost died in one. Not Sherlock. Not John, either. He texted right back that he and Mary wouldn't miss it for the world.

That's why I found myself, at 11:00 p.m. on November 5th, driving poor Mr. Wilkinson to his last party. Sherlock looked like a little boy at Christmas, all lighted up inside, as if a corpse was a shiny new bicycle. He helped me lay out the body on the kitchen table; it was small; Mr. Wilkinson hung off the ends. It was a bit ridiculous.

(Mrs. Hudson was out, of course.)

While Mary and I stood to the side, sipping drinks, Sherlock and John doused the cadaver with a foul-smelling chemical. "Synch watches," said the detective briskly. "I'll want the exact time of combustion."

Combustion? I took another swallow of sherry and tried to imagine I hadn't heard him correctly.

At 11:23 p.m., the four of us hauled Mr. Wilkinson into the street. Just as Sherlock had predicted, the only people about were some drunk teenagers and Billy Wiggins, who had been stationed outside to alert us if anyone sober came by. He nodded and waved from the end of the street, looking as pleased as a cat catching mice.

At 11:30 on the dot, our bonfire began. At 11:35, I understood why the word "combustion" had come into the matter, because that is exactly what Mr. Wilkinson did. It was too startling to be gruesome. He looked like, well, something strangely spectacular. I had, purposefully, avoided finding out what it was Sherlock had put on the body, but it looked like fireworks, as if Mr. Wilkinson, in death, had become a glowing Roman Candle.

"Excellent!" shouted Sherlock.

Just then, an upper-floor window opened next door, and an elderly woman's head popped out. "Oy, Mr. Holmes," she said, her speech drunkenly slurred, "I dunno where you get your effigies, but you have the best fire every year." She shut the window with a loud clang.

As quickly as could be managed, Sherlock put the fire out and disposed of the ashes in the appropriate bags. I couldn't fault his precautions.

We went inside, and John pulled out a tin of Mrs. Hudson's biscuits. He, Mary, and I sat around polishing them off, while Sherlock feverishly recorded the results of his "experiment," as he called it, in a black Moleskine notebook.

"Many thanks to Mr. Wilkinson!" he finally said, looking up with a smile on his face. "A most excellent bonfire night. Don't you agree, John?"

"Why not?" asked Dr. Watson, raising his glass in a toast. "To Mr. Wilkinson," he said.

"To Mr. Wilkinson," the rest of us echoed.

I had to admit, I'd enjoyed it quite a bit more than dinner with the girls.


	65. A Christmas Idea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Knowing John, he'll have us swanning around in Inverness Capes, saying things like "afoot" and making ridiculous "tut-tutting" noises.

A Christmas Idea

John says he's thinking of writing fiction.

I told him that reading a whole lot of Charles Dickens would lead to nothing good, but he swears his blog readers are thrilled at the idea. I'm sure they are; most of them are of average intelligence at best.

Anyway, to add insult to injury, he's hellbent on putting us into the Victorian period. Says he dreamed about it one night, and now he can't rest until he's done it.

It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Knowing John, he'll have us swanning around in Inverness Capes, saying things like "afoot" and making ridiculous "tut-tutting" noises. England has entirely too much Victorian literature as it is.

Mrs. Hudson is thrilled at the idea, of course. Went off on some long story yesterday about how she once went Victorian for a fancy dress party. It's difficult to imagine Mary as a Victorian woman. I told John he'd have to cast her as the femme fatale. He wouldn't speak to me for the rest of the day. I suppose it didn't help that I told him if I were to travel back in time, I would immediately find a cozy opium den to hole up in, and no one would bother about things like addictions and responsibilities.

Mycroft it would suit perfectly. In fact, I've often thought that if time travel ever came into being, my brother would manage to appropriate it for his own use, just for the mundane task of sending himself back to some time period in which gentlemen could sit around smoking all day and never say a civil word to their neighbors and no one would think twice about it.

Victorian books are like Christmas fruitcakes. Everyone knows how vile they are, but somehow they keep coming around, and people keep making more of them.

I did tell John I'd actually buy him a present this year if he would make Donovan a Victorian murderess.


	66. Brother-Mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I looked him straight in those piercing eyes. "I'm not mad at you. This is my fault. I should have been paying more attention."

Diary of Mycroft Holmes, Date [Redacted]

He was five. I found him in the neighbors' treehouse, too scared to climb down. The structure was too small for both of us, so I was forced to stand below it, yelling up to him. "It's all right, Sherlock. I'll catch you if you start to fall." He peered down at me over the side, his eyes wide with fear and apprehension.

Finally, after ten minutes of cajoling, he climbed slowly down the rope ladder, his short legs barely reaching each rung as he went. I think I was more nervous than he was, my heart stuck in my throat, ready to spring into action if he needed me. But he made it just fine on his own.

I'd intended to be quite cross with him, but when he reached the ground, he flew straight to me, and I couldn't resist picking him up and holding onto him for dear life. He was quite a sweet child, back then.

"What were you thinking, Brother-Mine?" He was heavy, but I carried him home anyway. I didn't want to let go.

"I wanted to be a pirate," he said softly, his face buried in my shoulder.

Later that day, when my mother had returned from the advanced calculus course she taught and my father from his insurance sales job, we sat around the living room, and I recounted the story. I'd have preferred they not know, but I was afraid the neighbors had seen something and might tell.

"All's well that ends well," said my mother a bit absently. She's always been quite tolerant of our explorations, as long as we come back in one piece.

My father, always the sensible one of the two of them, looked over at Sherlock, who was sitting stiffly on the end of the sofa. "That was a naughty thing to do while Mycroft was trying to watch you," he said.

I watched my brother's pale, frightened face, and in an instant, I put in, "It was my fault, Dad. I wasn't watching him closely enough."

Dad's attention turned to me. "It's all right," he said. "You brought him home."

He turned back to Sherlock. "Come here." Sherlock did as he was told, and our father, who never had it in him to be cross for long, kept my brother in front of him for a moment. "Promise me you won't run away from your brother. He'll always take care of you, but you have to let him." Sherlock nodded seriously, and Dad took him onto his lap and cuddled him, which Sherlock seemed to like back then. "I'm glad you're all right, Sport."

\---

He was eleven. I found him in the abandoned house down the street, curled up with Redbeard, crying his eyes out. I didn't know what to do. My parents were looking for him too, on the other side of the street, but too far away to hear me call. "Come on," I said. "It's time to come home, Sherlock."

He opened his eyes and looked at me, and I won't ever forget it. There was no anger or resentment, just heartbroken, uncomprehending vulnerability. "Why?" he asked. "They'll just take him."

I took a deep breath. "You know why, Brother-Mine. He has cancer. If they don't put him down now, he'll suffer. You don't want him to suffer."

He sobbed into Redbeard's neck. "He—he might get better."

"He won't," I said. "I'm sorry." My brother ran, leaving me alone in the house with our aged dog, who came to me and nuzzled my leg, as if to say he understood and forgave me, even if Sherlock didn't.

"Are you all right?" My father's voice pulled me from my frozen contemplation.

"Yes," I said mechanically. "He was just here. He ran off in the direction of our house."

"Going home, then, I expect," Dad answered. "Good work, Son." He put a hand on my shoulder lightly. It was a comforting gesture, but I just felt cold and unhappy.

Sherlock was at home, locked in his room, and he wouldn't come out until Dad picked the lock two days later and made him eat with us. He sat across the table from me, but he wouldn't look me in the eyes.

\---

He was fifteen. I was home for the summer, on a break from university, and my parents left me with Sherlock while they went on a seaside holiday. They didn't mean to be unkind; quite the opposite—they knew my brother and I neither one had any desire to go on a family holiday to the ocean.

By that time, Sherlock had taken up chemistry, but as he'd managed to keep from blowing himself up or otherwise permanently maiming himself thus far, I wasn't terribly worried about his detective pursuits. We each kept to ourselves mostly. It wasn't a hostile atmosphere, just a separated one. The thing I always insisted on doing, however, was checking on my brother to make sure he was in by midnight.

A week after my parents had gone, I peeked in and found Sherlock's bed empty. I rolled my eyes at first, figuring that he'd lost track of the time while doing an experiment outside or stayed at the library in town too long and been forced to walk home because no more buses were running.

I have never viewed myself as a detective, but I can certainly follow clues, and I deduced from the evidence of Sherlock's behavior that he was still in the vicinity of our house. He hadn't taken his jacket or the ripped bookbag he always brought with him when he went into town.

I started making telephone calls, apologizing profusely for the late hour, but no one had seen him. Finally, I ventured out, feeling more annoyed than anything else. My objective was the abandoned lot two streets over, and when I got there, I realized my deductions were correct.

Sherlock was alone, smoking something that smelled very different from a cigarette. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Feels amazing," he said.

To make a long and tedious story short, I had to put him over my shoulder and carry him home. Thankfully, he was even slighter then than he is now, and I didn't have that much trouble carrying him.

The next day, when he came downstairs ravenous for breakfast, I was waiting. "How many times?" I asked.

"Just last night," he answered. He wasn't lying; I can tell.

I knew threats or appeals weren't likely to work, so I cut to the chase. "Do you want to end up with average intelligence?"

He shook his head. "But Mycroft, I felt—calm." His eyes asked if I was angry. He's always hated when I'm angry with him.

I looked him straight in those piercing eyes. "I'm not mad at you. This is my fault. I should have been paying more attention."

He looked deeply relieved. "I don't care."

\---

He was nineteen. I was working in London by then, beginning to carve out the position for myself that I now occupy. Sherlock was in his first semester at Cambridge when I got a call from my father.

"Son, your brother promised to call once a week, and we haven't heard from him in three." Sherlock hates to promise things, but when he does, it's extremely unlike him to break his word. I was annoyed at myself for being worried, but I was, instantly, so worried I started to look right away.

I'd become more sophisticated in my methods by then. It would be tedious to write myself a full account of the details of how I tracked him, but I found him on the floor of a dirty house in Soho, and I took him home to my flat.

"This isn't the same as smoking weed in the vacant lot near our house."

"I know it's not." He was lying on my sofa, which had been white, but now had dirt stains all over it. I didn't care.

"What do you expect me to tell Mummy and Dad?" I asked.

"Whatever you want," he answered.

"But why?" I asked. "Your grades are excellent; you're even doing competitive martial arts. I thought—things were going well for you, finally."

"Boring," he answered. Boring was code; it always has been. Sherlock hates his emotions, hates to be anxious or sad or scared or unsure. So he calls it all boring.

I knelt beside the sofa and put my hands on both sides of his face, the way I used to when he was about six and I wanted to make him listen to me. "You will promise me one thing, Sherlock Holmes."

His eyes changed then. Where there had been anger and resentment, I found the bewildered vulnerability of the boy who'd been about to lose his dog. He was scared of me, afraid of what I would make him do. And I hated it. I'm very happy for certain people to be afraid of me and of what I can do. My brother is not one of them.

"A list, Sherlock. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you will write me a list of everything you take."

He relaxed, and I was both sorry and glad—glad that he was no longer terrified of me, but sorry that I was so helpless to fix what only he could fix for himself.

\---

He was twenty-three. I heard a knock at my flat door—the one I'd moved into the year before, after I'd gotten my promotion. I knew it was Sherlock before I saw him; I could tell by the tread and the way he knocked. Of course he knew where I'd moved, even though we hadn't seen each other; he's Sherlock Holmes.

He looked terrible, his cheeks hollow and his eyes red. Without speaking, he held out a piece of paper toward me, and I quickly scanned down the cocktail of what he'd ingested. I breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing likely to prove fatal. Fatal is one thing; unpleasant is another. For the next two days, my brother was in misery, able to keep nothing down, unable to sleep, sometimes hallucinating.

Finally, when it was all out of his system, he fell asleep next to the toilet, and I carried him into my bedroom and put him to bed. He woke up for a second and looked at me. "Mycroft, I want to stop."

"Then we'll do it together, Brother-Mine." I carded my hand through his hair, and he was too weak to stop me. I made sure he was asleep before I told him I loved him.

\---

This was a stupid week. My stupidity. I went against my own judgment when I locked up my little brother and forced him onto a suicide mission. I'd thought—hoped—well, told myself, that he was Sherlock Holmes, that of all people he could beat the odds of never coming back.

I should have known he would do exactly what he did, that when I went to rescue him, he would be glassy-eyed, and it would be my fault. I have his ripped-up list in my notebook. He asked me for a pardon, just like he used to ask for piggyback rides when he was little.

I got it for him, of course. I called in a personal favor so big that I'll have to spend the next twenty years earning it back. I phoned Sherlock and left him a message to meet me at the Diogenes Club.

"You look better," I said. He was cleaned up, and he had color in his cheeks.

"Why am I here?" he asked, sitting opposite me.

I handed him a file. "Your pardon. Here's the proof."

"What?" He looked up at me from his perusal of the papers, genuinely surprised.

I was touched, I'll admit. Very few things touch me any more; people are so hypocritical and deceitful and ugly. But this did.

"Did you think I wouldn't do it?"

"I know exactly how powerful you are. I know who you owe and who owes you. I know what you can do. This is—you'd have had to use all of your collateral." I didn't answer. I just waited while he stared down at his hands.

"Why?" He looked up and met me with the full force of his gaze.

"Do you really need to ask that?" I answered.

He shook his head. "No." It didn't take a great deal of perception to deduce that he had tears in his eyes.

"Quite right, Brother-Mine."

I went outside with him into the lamplit darkness of the London night, and he didn't flinch or pull away when I put my hand on his thin shoulder and left it there for quite a while.


	67. Closer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She knows that, now, the way she understands everything about me except the most important thing—she still doesn’t understand the difference between laughing and screaming.

Glass is all that separates us.

I play for her; she does not look at me.

I come again; this time, she turns, almost imperceptibly. I can tell she is listening.

I remember it all now, how she always found me when we tried to play hide-and-seek, even though I could never find her. The way she could predict even Mycroft’s strategies any time we tried boardgames. The way she looked when we told her she couldn’t be a pirate.

It hurt her to hurt me. She didn’t know she was doing it, and when she found out, she locked herself up in her room. I put a note under her door. I told her it was all right, that a pinprick in my finger wouldn’t hurt for long, that she would learn the difference between laughing and screaming the way she learned everything else.

We flew kites when she came out. Mycroft held her on his lap, his big hands around her small ones so the string wouldn’t escape. But Redbeard came, and she got angry. So much anger inside a tiny body. I was afraid. Not of what she would do to me, but of what was happening to her. I asked Mycroft why she wasn’t like us. He said he didn’t know. He never admitted that about anything else.

After that, Redbeard disappeared, and my sister went away, but she’d been gone for ages before the doctors put her in their white van. She’d gone inside herself, where nobody could reach her. 

I felt lonelier than I’d ever felt in my life. My parents walked around in a daze, and Mycroft took care of me, raised me the rest of the way. I suppose that’s why he was so angry the day he found me high for the first time. It was because he’d tried so hard. 

I blocked her out, until my brain consumed my memories, blotting her out of my life, forgetfulness engulfing us like a distance that can never be bridged. 

But she came to me anyway. She was in every child I saved, every person who came to me hurt and confused by their family’s rejection. I could not turn away the ones who reminded me of Eurus, even though I did not know why.

I walked toward her before I even remembered she existed. The people I helped, I helped for her sake.

She knows that, now, the way she understands everything about me except the most important thing—she still doesn’t understand the difference between laughing and screaming. She played a horrible game with me and laughed on the outside, but inside she was screaming all along. 

Once upon a time, an army doctor taught me that we don’t grow strong by being alone, that we can only find out who we truly are by spending ourselves for somebody else. He spent himself to be my friend, and in return I spent myself to be a brother.

I held her. 

You might think that we are further apart now, that the closest we could ever be was locked into each other’s embrace. But that was only the beginning. For my sister and me, closeness is not found in touch or words or even proximity. It’s found in the mind. 

Twice more, three times, a fourth visit and a fifth. Finally, she picks up her violin.

I play for her; she plays for me. We play together. All she ever wanted was to play together.

Glass is all that separates us now, and we are closer than we’ve ever been before.


End file.
